In this paper, we develop a nodal discontinuous Galerkin method for solving the time-dependent Maxwell’s equations when metamaterials are involved. Both semi- and fully-discrete schemes are constructed. Numerical stability and error estimate are proved for both schemes. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate that the method is not only efficient but also very effective in solving metamaterial Maxwell’s equatons.

Since 2000, the study of metamaterial has been a very hot topic due to its potential applications in many areas such as design of invisibility cloak and sub-wavelength imaging. Although several metamaterial models are often used by physicists and engineers, the study of their mathematical properties has lagged behind. In this paper, we initiate our investigation in the plasma-Lorentz model. More specifically, we first discuss the well-posedness of this model, then develop two fully-discrete finite element methods for solving it. Detailed stability and error analysis are carried out, and 3-D numerical results justifying our theoretical analysis are presented.

Peskin's Immersed Boundary (IB) method is one of the most popular numerical methods for many years and has been applied to problems in mathematical biology, fluid mechanics, material sciences, and many other areas. Peskiness IB method is associated with discrete delta functions. It is believed that the IB method is first order accurate in the $L^{\infty}$ norm. But almost no rigorous proof could be found in the literature until recently [Mori, Comm. Pure. Appl. Math: 61:2008] in which the author showed that the velocity is indeed first order accurate for the Stokes equations with a periodic boundary condition. In this paper, we show first order convergence with a $\log h$ factor of the IB method for elliptic interface problems with Dirichlet boundary conditions.

Solving wave propagation problems within heterogeneous media has been of great interest and has a wide range of applications in physics and engineering. The design of numerical methods for such general wave propagation problems is challenging because the energy conserving property has to be incorporated in the numerical algorithms in order to minimize the phase or shape errors after long time integration. In this paper, we focus on multi-dimensional wave problems and consider linear second-order wave equation in heterogeneous media. We develop and analyze an LDG method, in which numerical fluxes are carefully designed to maintain the energy preserving property and accuracy. Compatible high order energy conserving time integrators are also proposed. The optimal error estimates and the energy conserving property are proved for the semi-discrete methods. Our numerical experiments demonstrate optimal rates of convergence, and show that the errors of the numerical solutions do not grow significantly in time due to the energy conserving property.

Intrinsic curvature flows can be used to design Riemannian metrics by prescribed curvatures. This chapter presents three discrete curvature flow methods that are recently introduced into the engineering fields: the discrete Ricci flow and discrete Yamabe flow for surfaces with various topology, and the discrete curvature flow for hyperbolic 3-manifolds with boundaries. For each flow, we introduce its theories in both the smooth setting and the discrete setting, plus the numerical algorithms to compute it. We also provide a brief survey on their history and their link to some of the engineering applications in computer graphics, computer vision, medical imaging, computer aided design and others.