The gas dynamics equations, coupled with a static gravitational field, admit the hydrostatic balance where the flux produced by the pressure is exactly canceled by the gravitational source term. Many astrophysical problems involve the hydrodynamical evolution in a gravitational field, therefore it is essential to correctly capture the effect of gravitational force in the simulations. Improper treatment of the gravitational force can lead to a solution which either oscillates around the equilibrium, or deviates from the equilibrium after a long time run. In this paper we design high order well-balanced finite difference WENO schemes to this system, which can preserve the hydrostatic balance state exactly and at the same time can maintain genuine high order accuracy. Numerical tests are performed to verify high order accuracy, well-balanced property, and good resolution for smooth and discontinuous solutions. The main purpose of the well-balanced schemes designed in this paper is to well resolve small perturbations of the hydrostatic balance state on coarse meshes. The more difficult issue of convergence towards such hydrostatic balance state from an arbitrary initial condition is not addressed in this paper.

We implemented an adaptively refined least-squares finite element approach for the Navier-Stokes equations that govern generalized Newtonian fluid flows using the Carreau model. To capture the flow region, we developed an adaptive mesh refinement approach based on the least-squares method. The generated refined grids agree well with the physical attributes of the flows. We also proved that the least-squares approximation converges to the linearized versions solutions of the Carreau model at the best possible rate. Model problems considered in the study are the flow past a planar channel and 4-to-1 contraction problems. We presented the numerical results of the model problems, revealing the efficiency of the proposed scheme, and investigated the physical parameter effects.

Staggered grid techniques have been applied successfully to many problems. A distinctive advantage is that physical laws arising from the corresponding partial differential equations are automatically preserved. Recently, a staggered discontinuous Galerkin (SDG) method was developed for the convectiondiffusion equation. In this paper, we are interested in solving the steady state convectiondiffusion equation with a small diffusion coefficient . It is known that the exact solution may have large gradient in some regions and thus a very fine mesh is needed. For convection dominated problems, that is, when is small, exact solutions may contain sharp layers. In these cases, adaptive mesh refinement is crucial in order to reduce the computational cost. In this paper, a new SDG method is proposed and the proof of its stability is provided. In order to construct an adaptive mesh refinement strategy for this new

In this follow-up work, we extend the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods previously developed on rectangular meshes \cite{previous} to triangular meshes. The DG schemes in \cite{previous} are both optimally convergent and energy conserving. However, as we shall see in the numerical results section, the DG schemes on triangular meshes only have suboptimal convergence rate. We prove the energy conservation and an error estimate for the semi-discrete schemes. The stability of the fully discrete scheme is proved and its error estimate is stated. We present extensive numerical results with convergence consistent of our error estimate, and simulations of wave propagation in Drude metamaterials to demonstrate the flexibility of triangular meshes.

In this paper, we provide stability and convergence analysis for a class of finite difference schemes for unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in vorticity-stream function formulation. The no-slip boundary condition for the velocity is converted into local vorticity boundary conditions. Thom's formula, Wilkes' formula, or other local formulas in the earlier literature can be used in the second order method; while high order formulas, such as Briley's formula, can be used in the fourth order compact difference scheme proposed by E and Liu. The stability analysis of these long-stencil formulas cannot be directly derived from straightforward manipulations since more than one interior point is involved in the formula. The main idea of the stability analysis is to control local terms by global quantities via discrete elliptic regularity for stream function. We choose to analyze the second order scheme with Wilkes' formula in detail. In this case, we can avoid the complicated technique necessitated by the Strang-type high order expansions. As a consequence, our analysis results in almost optimal regularity assumption for the exact solution. The above methodology is very general. We also give a detailed analysis for the fourth order scheme using a 1-D Stokes model.