Positivity-preserving discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for solving hyperbolic conservation laws have been extensively studied in the last several years. But nearly all the developed schemes are coupled with explicit time discretizations. Explicit discretizations suffer from the constraint for the Courant-Friedrichs-Levis (CFL) number. This makes explicit methods impractical for problems involving unstructured and extremely varying meshes or long-time simulations. Instead, implicit DG schemes are often popular in practice, especially in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) community. In this paper we develop a high-order positivity-preserving DG method with the backward Euler time discretization for conservation laws. We focus on one spatial dimension, however the result easily generalizes to multidimensional tensor product meshes and polynomial spaces. This work is based on a generalization of the positivity-preserving limiters in (X. Zhang and C.-W. Shu, Journal of Computational Physics, 229 (2010), pp.~3091--3120) and (X. Zhang and C.-W. Shu, Journal of Computational Physics, 229 (2010), pp.~8918--8934) to implicit time discretizations. Both the analysis and numerical experiments indicate that a lower bound for the CFL number is required to obtain the positivity-preserving property. The proposed scheme not only preserves the positivity of the numerical approximation without compromising the designed high-order accuracy, but also helps accelerate the convergence towards the steady-state solution and add robustness to the nonlinear solver. Numerical experiments are provided to support these conclusions.

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In this paper, we apply the local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method to 2D Keller--Segel (KS) chemotaxis model. We improve the results upon (Y. Epshteyn and A. Kurganov, SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, 47 (2008), 368-408) and give optimal rate of convergence under special finite element spaces before the blow-up occurs (the exact solutions are smooth). Moreover, to construct physically relevant numerical approximations, we consider $P^1$ LDG scheme and develop a positivity-preserving limiter to the scheme, extending the idea in (Y. Zhang, X. Zhang and C.-W. Shu, Journal of Computational Physics, 229 (2010), 8918-8934). With this limiter, we can prove the $L^1$-stability of the numerical scheme. Numerical experiments are performed to demonstrate the good performance of the positivity-preserving LDG scheme. Moreover, it is known that the chemotaxis model will yield blow-up solutions under certain initial conditions. We numerically demonstrate how to find the approximate blow-up time by using the $L^2$-norm of the $L^1$-stable numerical solution.

The goal of this paper is to develop a novel semi-implicit spectral deferred correction (SDC) time marching method. The method can be used in a large class of problems, especially for highly nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) without easily separating of stiff and non-stiff components, which is more general and efficient comparing with traditional semi-implicit SDC methods. The proposed semi-implicit SDC method is based on low order time integration methods and corrected iteratively. The order of accuracy is increased for each additional iteration. And we also explore its local truncation error analytically. This SDC method is intended to be combined with the method of lines, which provides a flexible framework to develop high order semi-implicit time marching methods for nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). In this paper we mainly focus on the applications of the nonlinear PDEs with higher order spatial derivatives, e.g. convection diffusion equation, the surface diffusion and Willmore flow of graphs, the Cahn– Hilliard equation, the Cahn–Hilliard–Brinkman system and the phase field crystal equation. Coupled with the local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) spatial discretization, the fully discrete schemes are all high order accurate in both space and time, and stable numerically with the time step proportional to the spatial mesh size. Numerical experiments are carried out to illustrate the accuracy and capability of the proposed semi-implicit SDC method.

In this paper we present a rigorous derivation of the material parameters for both the cylinder and rectangle cloaking structures. Numerical results using these material parameters are presented to demonstrate the cloaking effect.