In this article, we present a second-order in time implicit-explicit (IMEX) local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method for computing the Cahn-Hilliard equation, which describes the phase separation phenomenon. It is well-known that the Cahn-Hilliard equation has a nonlinear stability property, i.e., the free-energy functional decreases with respect to time. The discretized Cahn-Hilliard system modeled by the IMEX LDG method can inherit the nonlinear stability of the continuous model. We apply a stabilization technique and prove unconditional energy stability of our scheme. Numerical experiments are performed to validate the analysis. Computational efficiency can be significantly enhanced by using this IMEX LDG method with a large time step.

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.

In this paper, we discuss high order finite difference weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) schemes, coupled with total variation diminishing (TVD) Runge-Kutta (RK) temporal integration, for solving the semilinear hyperbolic system of a correlated random walk model describing movement of animals and cells in biology. Since the solutions to this system are non-negative, we discuss a positivity-preserving limiter without compromising accuracy. Analysis is performed to justify the maintanance of third order spatial / temporal accuracy when the limiters are applied to a third order finite difference scheme and third order TVD-RK time discretization for solving this model. Numerical results are also provided to demonstrate these methods up to fifth order accuracy.

In this paper we develop a leap-frog-type finite element method for modeling the electromagnetic wave propagation in metamaterials. The metamaterial model equations are represented by integrodifferential Maxwell’s equations, which are quite challenging to analyze and solve in that we have to solve a coupled problem with different partial differential equations given in different material regions. Our method is based on a mixed finite element method using edge elements, which can easily handle the tangential continuity of the electric field. Stability analysis and optimal error estimate are carried out for the proposed scheme. The scheme is implemented and confirmed to obey the proved optimal convergence rate by using a smooth analytical solution. Then the scheme is extended to model wave propagation in heterogeneous media composed of metamaterials and free space, and extensive numerical results (using a rectangular edge element, a triangular edge element, and mixed edge elements) demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm for modeling the exotic backward wave propagation phenomenon in metamaterials. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper with an exhaustive simulation of backward wave propagation in metamaterials using time-domain finite element methods.

In this paper, we develop a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method to solve the ideal special relativistic hydrodynamics (RHD) and design a bound-preserving (BP) limiter for this scheme by extending the idea in (X. Zhang and C.-W. Shu, Journal of Computational Physics, 229 (2010), 8918-8934). For RHD, the density and pressure are positive and the velocity is bounded by the speed of light. One difficulty in numerically solving the RHD in its conservative form is that the failure of preserving these physical bounds will result in ill-posedness of the problem and blowup of the code, especially in extreme relativistic cases. The standard way in dealing with this difficulty is to add extra numerical dissipation, while in doing so there is no guarantee in maintaining the high order of accuracy. Our BP limiter has the following features. It can theoretically guarantee to preserve the physical bounds for the numerical solution and maintain its designed high order accuracy. The limiter is local to the cell and hence is very easy to implement. Moreover, it renders $L^1$-stability to the numerical scheme. Numerical experiments are performed to demonstrate the good performance of this bound-preserving DG scheme. Even though we only discuss the BP limiter for DG schemes, it can be applied to high order finite volume schemes, such as weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) finite volume schemes as well.