In this paper, we develop and analyze discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods to solve hyperbolic equations involving $\delta$-singularities. Negative-order norm error estimates for the accuracy of DG approximations to $\delta$-singularities are investigated. We first consider linear hyperbolic conservation laws in one space dimension with singular initial data. We prove that, by using piecewise $k$-th degree polynomials, at time $t$, the error in the $H^{-(k+2)}$ norm over the whole domain is $(k+1/2)$-th order, and the error in the $H^{-(k+1)}(\mathbb{R}\backslash\mathcal{R}_t)$ norm is $(2k+1)$-th order, where $\mathcal{R}_t$ is the pollution region due to the initial singularity with the width of order $\mathcal{O}(h^{1/2} \log (1/h))$ and $h$ is the maximum cell length. As an application of the negative-order norm error estimates, we convolve the numerical solution with a suitable kernel which is a linear combination of B-splines, to obtain $L^2$ error estimate of $(2k+1)$-th order for the post-processed solution. Moreover, we also obtain high order superconvergence error estimates for linear hyperbolic conservation laws with singular source terms by applying Duhamel's principle. Numerical examples including an acoustic equation and the nonlinear rendez-vous algorithms are given to demonstrate the good performance of DG methods for solving hyperbolic equations involving $\delta$-singularities.

We develop an alternative formulation of conservative finite difference weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) schemes to solve conservation laws. In this formulation, the WENO interpolation of the solution and its derivatives are used to directly construct the numerical flux, instead of the usual practice of reconstructing the flux functions. Even though this formulation is more expensive than the standard formulation, it does have several advantages. The first advantage is that arbitrary monotone fluxes can be used in this framework, while the traditional practice of reconstructing flux functions can be applied only to smooth flux splitting. The second advantage, which is fully explored in this paper, is that a narrower effective stencil is used compared with previous high order finite difference WENO schemes based on the reconstruction of flux functions, with a Lax-Wendroff time discretization. We will describe the scheme formulation and present numerical tests for one- and two-dimensional scalar and system conservation laws demonstrating the designed high order accuracy and non-oscillatory performance of the schemes constructed in this paper.

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In this work a simple method to enforce the positivity-preserving property for general high-order conservative schemes is proposed. The method detects critical numerical fluxes which may lead to negative density and pressure, and then imposes a simple flux limiter combining the high-order numerical flux with the first-order Lax-Friedrichs flux to satisfy a sufficient condition for preserving positivity. Though an extra time-step size condition is required to maintain the formal order of accuracy, it is less restrictive than those in previous works. A number of numerical examples suggest that this method, when applied on an essentially non-oscillatory scheme, can be used to prevent positivity failure when the flow involves vacuum or near vacuum and very strong discontinuities.

Wave propagation problems arise in a wide range of applications. The energy conserving property is one of the guiding principles for numerical algorithms, in order to minimize the phase or shape errors after long time integration. In this paper, we develop and analyze a local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method for solving the wave equation. We prove optimal error estimates, superconvergence toward a particular projection of the exact solution, and the energy conserving property for the semi-discrete formulation. The analysis is extended to the fully discrete LDG scheme, with the centered second-order time discretization (the leap-frog scheme). Our numerical experiments demonstrate optimal rates of convergence and superconvergence. We also show that the shape of the solution, after long time integration, is well preserved due to the energy conserving property.