In this paper, we study the classical Allen-Cahn equations and investigate the maximum-principle-preserving (MPP) techniques. The Allen-Cahn equation has been widely used in mathematical models for problems in materials science and fluid dynamics. It enjoys the energy stability and the maximum-principle. Moreover, it is well known that the Allen-Cahn equation may yield thin interface layer, and nonuniform meshes might be useful in the numerical solutions. Therefore, we apply the local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method due to its flexibility on h-p adaptivity and complex geometry. However, the MPP LDG methods require slope limiters, then the energy stability may not be easy to obtain. In this paper, we only discuss the MPP technique and use numerical experiments to demonstrate the energy decay property. Moreover, due to the stiff source given in the equation, we use the conservative modified exponential Runge-Kutta methods and thus can use relatively large time step sizes. Thanks to the conservative time integration, the bounds of the unknown function will not decay. Numerical experiments will be given to demonstrate the good performance of the MPP LDG scheme.

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In this paper, we propose a new type of weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) limiter, which belongs to the class of Hermite WENO (HWENO) limiters, for the Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin (RKDG) methods solving hyperbolic conservation laws. This new HWENO limiter is a modification of the simple WENO limiter proposed recently by Zhong and Shu. Both limiters use information of the DG solutions only from the target cell and its immediate neighboring cells, thus maintaining the original compactness of the DG scheme. The goal of both limiters is to obtain high order accuracy and non-oscillatory properties simultaneously. The main novelty of the new HWENO limiter in this paper is to reconstruct the polynomial on the target cell in a least square fashion while the simple WENO limiter is to use the entire polynomial of the original DG solutions in the neighboring cells with an addition of a constant for conservation. The modification in this paper improves the robustness in the computation of problems with strong shocks or contact discontinuities, without changing the compact stencil of the DG scheme. Numerical results for both one and two dimensional equations including Euler equations of compressible gas dynamics are provided to illustrate the viability of this modified limiter.

In this paper, we consider a bilevel polynomial optimization problem where the objective and the constraint functions of both the upper-and the lower-level problems are polynomials. We present methods for finding its global minimizers and global minimum using a sequence of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations and provide convergence results for the methods. Our scheme for problems with a convex lower-level problem involves solving a transformed equivalent single-level problem by a sequence of SDP relaxations, whereas our approach for general problems involving a nonconvex polynomial lower-level problem solves a sequence of approximation problems via another sequence of SDP relaxations.