A Discontinuous Ritz Method for a Class of Calculus of Variations Problems

Year:    2019

Author:    Xiaobing Feng, Stefan Schnake

International Journal of Numerical Analysis and Modeling, Vol. 16 (2019), Iss. 2 : pp. 340–356

Abstract

This paper develops an analogue (or counterpart) to discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for approximating a general class of calculus of variations problems. The proposed method, called the discontinuous Ritz (DR) method, constructs a numerical solution by minimizing a discrete energy over DG function spaces. The discrete energy includes standard penalization terms as well as the DG finite element (DG-FE) numerical derivatives developed recently by Feng, Lewis, and Neilan in [7]. It is proved that the proposed DR method converges and that the DG-FE numerical derivatives exhibit a compactness property which is desirable and crucial for applying the proposed DR method to problems with more complex energy functionals. Numerical tests are provided on the classical $p$-Laplace problem to gauge the performance of the proposed DR method.

Journal Article Details

Publisher Name:    Global Science Press

Language:    English

DOI:    https://doi.org/2019-IJNAM-12807

International Journal of Numerical Analysis and Modeling, Vol. 16 (2019), Iss. 2 : pp. 340–356

Published online:    2019-01

AMS Subject Headings:    Global Science Press

Copyright:    COPYRIGHT: © Global Science Press

Pages:    17

Keywords:    Variational problems minimizers discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods DG finite element numerical calculus compactness convergence.

Author Details

Xiaobing Feng

Stefan Schnake