Fully discrete interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin methods for nonlinear parabolic equations

In this article, we investigate interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (IPDG) methods for solving a class of two‐dimensional nonlinear parabolic equations. For semi‐discrete IPDG schemes on a quasi‐uniform family of meshes, we obtain a priori bounds on solutions measured in the L² norm and in the broken Sobolev norm. The fully discrete IPDG schemes considered are based on the approximation by forward Euler difference in time and broken Sobolev space. Under a restriction related to the mesh size and time step, an hp ‐version of an a priori l^∞(L²) and l²(H¹) error estimate is derived and numerical experiments are presented.© 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 28: 288–311, 2012