For decades, the widely used finite difference method on staggered grids, also known as the marker and cell (MAC) method, has been one of the simplest and most effective numerical schemes for solving the Stokes equations and Navier–Stokes equations. Its superconvergence on uniform meshes has been observed by Nicolaides (SIAM J Numer Anal 29(6):1579–1591, 1992), but the rigorous proof is never given. Its behavior on non-uniform grids is not well studied, since most publications only consider uniform grids. In this work, we develop the MAC scheme on non-uniform rectangular meshes, and for the first time we theoretically prove that the superconvergence phenomenon (i.e., second order convergence in the L2 norm for both velocity and pressure) holds true for the MAC method on non-uniform rectangular meshes. With a careful and accurate analysis of various sources of errors, we observe that even though the local truncation errors are only first order in terms of mesh size, the global errors after summation are second order due to the amazing cancellation of local errors. This observation leads to the elegant superconvergence analysis even with non-uniform meshes. Numerical results are given to verify our theoretical analysis.

A convex non-convex variational model is proposed for multiphase image segmentation. We consider a specially designed non-convex regularization term which adapts spatially to the image structures for better controlling of the segmentation and easy handling of the intensity inhomogeneities. The nonlinear optimization problem is effciently solved by an Alternating Directions Methods of Multipliers procedure. We provide a convergence analysis and perform numerical experiments on several images, showing the effectiveness of this procedure.

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.

This paper is concerned with superconvergence properties of discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for 2-D linear hyperbolic conservation laws over rectangular meshes when upwind fluxes are used. We prove, under some suitable initial and boundary discretizations, the ($2k+1$)-th order superconvergence rate of the DG approximation at the downwind points and for the cell averages, when piecewise tensor-product polynomials of degree $k$ are used. Moreover, we prove that the gradient of the DG solution is superconvergent with a rate of ($k+1$)-th order at all interior left Radau points; and the function value approximation is superconvergent at all right Radau points with a rate of ($k+2$)-th order. Numerical experiments indicate that the aforementioned superconvergence rates are sharp.

In this paper we consider a discontinuous Galerkin discretization of the ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations on unstructured meshes, and the divergence free constraint ($\nabla \cdot \B = 0$) of its magnetic field $\B$. We first present two approaches for maintaining the divergence free constraint, namely the approach of a locally divergence free projection inspired by locally divergence free elements \cite{Li2005}, and another approach of the divergence cleaning technique given by Dedner et al. \cite{Dedner2002}. By combining these two approaches we obtain a efficient method at the almost same numerical cost. Finally, numerical experiments are performed to show the capacity and efficiency of the scheme.