In this paper, we analyze the Lax-Wendroff discontinuous Galerkin (LWDG) method for solving linear conservation laws. The method was originally proposed by Guo et al., where they applied local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) techniques to approximate high order spatial derivatives in the Lax-Wendroff time discretization. We show that, under the standard CFL condition $\tau\leq \lambda h$ (where $\tau$ and $h$ are the time step and the maximum element length respectively and $\lambda>0$ is a constant) and uniform or non-increasing time steps, the second order schemes with piecewise linear elements and the third order schemes with arbitrary piecewise polynomial elements are stable in the $L^2$ norm. The specific type of stability may differ with different choices of numerical fluxes. Our stability analysis includes multidimensional problems with divergence-free coefficients. Besides solving the equation itself, the LWDG method also gives approximations to its time derivative simultaneously. We obtain optimal error estimates for both the solution $u$ and its first order time derivative $u_t$ in one dimension, and numerical examples are given to validate our analysis.

In this paper we propose a finite element time-domain method for modeling the optical black holes (OBHs) coupled with the perfectly matched layer (PML) technique. Stability analysis is carried out for the proposed scheme. Simulations of cylindrical, elliptical and square black holes demonstrate that our method is quite effective in modeling OBHs in time domain. To our best knowledge, this is the first OBHs simulation realized by the finite element time-domain method.

In this paper, we present a staggered discontinuous Galerkin immersed boundary method (SDGIBM) for the numerical approximation of fluid-structure interaction. The immersed boundary method is used to model the fluid-structure interaction, while the fluid flow is governed by incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. One advantage of using Galerkin method over the finite difference method with immersed boundary method is that we can avoid approximations of the Dirac Delta function. Another key ingredient of our method is that our solver for incompressible Navier-Stokes equations combines the advantages of discontinuous Galerkin methods and staggered meshes, and results in many good properties, namely local and global conservations and pointwise divergence-free velocity field by a local postprocessing technique. Furthermore, energy stability is improved by a skew-symmetric discretization of the convection term. We will present numerical results to show the performance of the method.

The numerical approximation of high-frequency wave propagation in inhomogeneous media is a challenging problem. In particular, computing high-frequency solutions by direct simulations requires several points per wavelength for stability and usually requires many points per wavelength for a satisfactory accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new method for the acoustic wave equation in inhomogeneous media in the time domain to achieve superior accuracy and stability without using a large number of unknowns. The method is based on a discontinuous Galerkin discretization together with carefully chosen basis functions. To obtain the basis functions, we use the idea from geometrical optics and construct the basis functions by using the leading order term in the asymptotic expansion. Also, we use a wavefront tracking method and a dimension reduction procedure to obtain dominant rays in each cell. We show

We consider numerical boundary conditions for high order finite difference schemes for solving convection-diffusion equations on arbitrary geometry. The two main difficulties for numerical boundary conditions in such situations are: (1) the wide stencil of the high order finite difference operator requires special treatment for a few ghost points near the boundary; (2) the physical boundary may not coincide with grid points in a Cartesian mesh and may intersect with the mesh in an arbitrary fashion. For purely convection equations, the so-called inverse Lax-Wendroff procedure, in which we convert the normal derivatives into the time derivatives and tangential derivatives along the physical boundary by using the equations, have been quite successful. In this paper, we extend this methodology to convection-diffusion equations. It turns out that this extension is non-trivial, because totally different boundary treatments are needed for the diffusion-dominated and the convection-dominated regimes. We design a careful combination of the boundary treatments for the two regimes and obtain a stable and accurate boundary condition for general convection-diffusion equations. We provide extensive numerical tests for one- and two-dimensional problems involving both scalar equations and systems, including the compressible Navier-Stokes equations, to demonstrate the good performance of our numerical boundary conditions.