A recently developed nonlocal vector calculus is exploited to provide a variational analysis for a general class of nonlocal diffusion problems described by a linear integral equation on bounded domains in Rn. The nonlocal vector calculus also enables striking analogies to be drawn between the nonlocal model and classical models for diffusion, including a notion of nonlocal flux. The ubiquity of the nonlocal operator in applications is illustrated by a number of examples ranging from continuum mechanics to graph theory. In particular, it is shown that fractional Laplacian and fractional derivative models for anomalous diffusion are special cases of the nonlocal model for diffusion that we consider. The numerous applications elucidate different interpretations of the operator and the associated governing equations. For example, a probabilistic perspective explains that the nonlocal spatial operator appearing in our model corresponds to the infinitesimal generator for a symmetric jump process. Sufficient conditions on the kernel of the nonlocal operator and the notion of volume constraints are shown to lead to a well-posed problem. Volume constraints are a proxy for boundary conditions that may not be defined for a given kernel. In particular, we demonstrate for a general class of kernels that the nonlocal operator is a mapping between a volume constrained subspace of a fractional Sobolev subspace and its dual. We also demonstrate for other particular kernels that the inverse of the operator does not smooth but does correspond to diffusion. The impact of our results is that both a continuum analysis and a numerical method for the modeling of anomalous diffusion on bounded domains in Rn are provided. The analytical framework allows us to consider finite-dimensional approximations using discontinuous and continuous Galerkin methods, both of which are conforming for the nonlocal diffusion equation we consider; error and condition number estimates are derived.

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In this paper, a novel penalty method based on the immersed boundary formulation is proposed for simulating the transient Stokes flow with an inextensible interface enclosing a suspended solid particle. The main idea of this approach relies on the penalty techniques by modifying the constitutive equation of Stokes flow to weaken the incompressibility condition, relating the surface divergence to the elastic tension $\sigma$ to relax the interface's inextensibility, and connecting the particle surface-velocity with the particle surface force ${\mbf F}$ to regularize the particle's rigid motion. The advantage of these regularized governing equations is that when they are discretized by the standard centered difference scheme on a staggered grid, the resulting linear system can easily be reduced by eliminating the unknowns $p_h$, $\sigma_h$ and ${\mbf F}_h$ directly, so that we just need to solve a smaller linear system of the velocity approximation ${\mbf u}_h$. This advantage is preserved and even enhanced when such approach is applied to the transient Stokes flow with multiple compound vesicles. Moreover, this smaller linear system is symmetric and negative-definite, which enables us to use efficient linear solvers. Another important feature of the proposed method is that the discretization scheme is unconditionally stable in the sense that an appropriately defined energy functional associated with the discrete system is decreasing and hence bounded in time. We numerically test the accuracy and stability of the immersed boundary discretization scheme. The tank-treading and tumbling motions of inextensible interface with a suspended solid particle in the simple shear flow will be studied extensively. The simulation of the motion of multiple compound vesicles will be performed as well. Numerical results illustrate the superior performance of the proposed penalty method.

We consider polynomial approximation on the unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^2=\{(x,y,z)\in \mathbb{R}^3:x^2+y^2+z^2=1\}$ by a class of regularized discrete least squares methods with novel choices for the regularization operator and the point sets of the discretization. We allow different kinds of rotationally invariant regularization operators, including the zero operator (in which case the approximation includes interpolation, quasi-interpolation, and hyperinterpolation); powers of the negative Laplace--Beltrami operator (which can be suitable when there are data errors); and regularization operators that yield filtered polynomial approximations. As node sets we use spherical $t$-designs, which are point sets on the sphere which when used as equal-weight quadrature rules integrate all spherical polynomials up to degree $t$ exactly. More precisely, we use well conditioned spherical $t$-designs obtained in a previous paper by maximizing the determinants of the Gram matrices subject to the spherical design constraint. For $t\ge 2L$ and an approximating polynomial of degree $L$ it turns out that there is no linear algebra problem to be solved and the approximation in some cases recovers known polynomial approximation schemes, including interpolation, hyperinterpolation, and filtered hyperinterpolation. For $t \in [L, 2L)$ the linear system needs to be solved numerically. Finally, we give numerical examples to illustrate the theoretical results and show that well chosen regularization operator and well conditioned spherical $t$-designs can provide good polynomial approximation on the sphere, with or without the presence of data errors.