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 generalize a new type of limiters based on the weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) finite volume methodology for the Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin (RKDG) methods solving nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws, which were recently developed for structured meshes, to two-dimensional unstructured triangular meshes. The key idea of such limiters is to use the entire polynomials of the DG solutions from the troubled cell and its immediate neighboring cells, and then apply the classical WENO procedure to form a convex combination of these polynomials based on smoothness indicators and nonlinear weights, with suitable adjustments to guarantee conservation. The main advantage of this new limiter is its simplicity in implementation, especially for the unstructured meshes considered in this paper, as only information from immediate neighbors is needed and the usage of complicated geometric information of the meshes is largely avoided. Numerical results for both scalar equations and Euler systems of compressible gas dynamics are provided to illustrate the good performance of this procedure.

In this paper, we propose a new stabilized linear finite element method for solving reaction-convection-diffusion equations with arbitrary magnitudes of reaction and diffusion. The key feature of the new method is that the test function in the stabilization term is taken in the adjoint-operator-like form $-\varepsilon \Delta v- ({\mbf a}\cdot\nabla v)/\gamma+\sigma v$, where the parameter $\gamma$ is appropriately designed to adjust the convection strength to achieve high accuracy and stability. We derive the stability estimates for the finite element solutions and establish the explicit dependence of $L^2$ and $H^1$ error bounds on the diffusivity, modulus of the convection field, reaction coefficient and the mesh size. The analysis shows that the proposed method is suitable for a wide range of mesh P\'{e}clet numbers and mesh Damk\"{o}hler numbers. More specifically, if the diffusivity $\varepsilon$ is sufficiently small with $\varepsilon < \Vert{\mbf a}\Vert h$ and the reaction coefficient $\sigma$ is large enough such that $\Vert{\mbf a}\Vert < \sigma h$, then the method exhibits optimal convergence rates in both $L^2$ and $H^1$ norms. However, for a small reaction coefficient satisfying $\Vert{\mbf a}\Vert \ge \sigma h$, the method behaves like the well-known streamline upwind/Petrov-Galerkin formulation of Brooks and Hughes. Several numerical examples exhibiting boundary or interior layers are given to demonstrate the high performance of the proposed method. Moreover, we apply the developed method to time-dependent reaction-convection-diffusion problems and simulation results show the efficiency of the approach.

We further investigate the high order positivity-preserving discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for linear hyperbolic and radiative transfer equations developed in \cite{yuan}. The DG methods in \cite{yuan} can maintain positivity and high order accuracy, but they rely both on the scaling limiter in \cite{zhang1} and a rotational limiter, the latter may alter cell averages of the unmodulated DG scheme, thereby affecting conservation. Even though a Lax-Wendroff type theorem is proved in \cite{yuan}, guaranteeing convergence to weak solutions with correct shock speed when such rotational limiter is applied, it would still be desirable if a conservative DG method without changing the cell averages can be obtained which has both high order accuracy and positivity-preserving capability. In this paper, we develop and analyze such a DG method for both linear hyperbolic equations and radiative transfer equations. In the one-dimensional case, the method uses traditional DG space $P^k$ of piecewise polynomials of degree at most $k$. A key result is proved that the unmodulated DG solver in this case can maintain positivity of the cell average if the inflow boundary value and the source term are both positive, therefore the positivity-preserving framework in \cite{zhang1} can be used to obtain a high order conservative positivity-preserving DG scheme. Unfortunately, in two-dimensions this is no longer the case. We show that the unmodulated DG solver based either on $P^k$ or $Q^k$ spaces (piecewise $k$-th degree polynomials or piecewise tensor-product $k$-th degree polynomials) could generate negative cell averages. We augment the DG space with additional functions so that the positivity of cell averages from the unmodulated DG solver can be restored, thereby leading to high order conservative positivity-preserving DG scheme based on these augmented DG spaces following the framework in \cite{zhang1}. Computational results are provided to demonstrate the good performance of our DG schemes.

We consider the solution of large-scale Lyapunov and Stein equations. For Stein equations, the well-known Smith method will be adapted, with A_k = A^{2^k} not explicitly computed but in the recursive form A_k = A^{2^k}, and the fast growing but diminishing components in the approximate solutions truncated. Lyapunov equations will be first treated with the Cayley transform before the Smith method is applied. For algebraic equations with numerically low-ranked solutions of dimension <i>n</i>, the resulting algorithms are of an efficient <i>O</i>(<i>n</i>) computational complexity and memory requirement per iteration and converge essentially quadratically. An application in the estimation of a lower bound of the condition number for continuous-time algebraic Riccati equations is presented, as well as some numerical results.