One of the main challenges in computational simulations of gas detonation propagation is that negative density or negative pressure may emerge during the time evolution, which will cause blow-ups. Therefore, schemes with provable positivity-preserving of density and pressure are desired. First order and second order positivity-preserving schemes were well studied. For high order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method, even though the characteristicwise TVB limiter can kill oscillations, it is not sufficient to maintain the positivity. A simple solution for arbitrarily high order positivity-preserving schemes solving Euler equations was proposed recently. In this paper, we first discuss an extension of the technique to design arbitrarily high order positivity-preserving DG schemes for reactive Euler equations. We then present a simpler and more robust implementation of the positivity-preserving limiter than the one before. Numerical tests, including very demanding examples in gaseous detonations, indicate that the third order DG scheme with the new positivity-preserving limiter produces satisfying results even without the TVB limiter.

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.

We propose a computational framework named iterative local adaptive majorize-minimization (I-LAMM) to simultaneously control algorithmic complexity and statistical error when fitting high dimensional models. I-LAMM is a two-stage algorithmic implementation of the local linear approximation to a family of folded concave penalized quasi-likelihood. The first stage solves a convex program with a crude precision tolerance to obtain a coarse initial estimator, which is further refined in the second stage by iteratively solving a sequence of convex programs with smaller precision tolerances. Theoretically, we establish a phase transition: the first stage has a sublinear iteration complexity, while the second stage achieves an improved linear rate of convergence. Though this framework is completely algorithmic, it provides solutions with optimal statistical performances and controlled algorithmic complexity for a large family

We propose a simple finite difference scheme for Navier--Stokes equations in primitive formulation on curvilinear domains. With proper boundary treatment and interplay between covariant and contravariant components, the spatial discretization admits exact Hodge decomposition and energy identity. As a result, the pressure can be decoupled from the momentum equation with explicit time stepping. No artificial pressure boundary condition is needed. In addition, it can be shown that this spatially compatible discretization leads to uniform inf-sup condition, which plays a crucial role in the pressure approximation of both dynamic and steady state calculations. Numerical experiments demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our scheme.

The immersed boundary method is one of the most useful computational methods in studying fluid structure interaction. On the other hand, the Immersed Boundary method is also known to require small time steps to maintain stability when solved with an explicit method. Many implicit or approximately implicit methods have been proposed in the literature to remove this severe time step stability constraint, but none of them give satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient semi-implicit scheme to remove this stiffness from the immersed boundary method for the Navier–Stokes equations. The construction of our semi-implicit scheme consists of two steps. First, we obtain a semiimplicit discretization which is proved to be unconditionally stable. This unconditionally stable semi-implicit scheme is still quite expensive to implement in practice. Next, we apply the small scale decomposition to the unconditionally stable semi-implicit scheme to construct our efficient semi-implicit scheme. Unlike other implicit or semi-implicit schemes proposed in the literature, our semi-implicit scheme can be solved explicitly in the spectral space. Thus the computational cost of our semi-implicit schemes is comparable to that of an explicit scheme. Our extensive numerical experiments show that our semiimplicit scheme has much better stability property than an explicit scheme. This offers a substantial computational saving in using the immersed boundary method.