Solutions for many problems of interest exhibit singular behaviors at domain corners or points where boundary condition changes type. For this type of problems, direct spectral methods with usual polynomial basis functions do not lead to a satisfactory convergence rate. We develop in this paper a M\"untz-Galerkin method which is based on specially tuned M\"untz polynomials to deal with the singular behaviors of the underlying problems. By exploring the relations between Jacobi polynomials and M\"untz polynomials, we develop efficient implementation procedures for the M\"untz-Galerkin method, and provide optimal error estimates. As examples of applications, we consider the Poisson equation with mixed Dirichlet-Neumann boundary conditions, whose solution behaves like $O(r^{1/2})$ near the singular point, and demonstrate that the M\"untz-Galerkin method greatly improves the rates of convergence of the usual spectral method.

In this paper we present an {\em a priori} error estimate of the Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin method for solving symmetrizable conservation laws, where the time is discretized with the third order explicit total variation diminishing Runge-Kutta method and the finite element space is made up of piecewise polynomials of degree $k\geq 2$. Quasi-optimal error estimate is obtained by energy techniques, for the so-called generalized E-fluxes under the standard temporal-spatial CFL condition $\tau\leq\gamma h$, where $h$ is the element length and $\tau$ is time step, and $\gamma$ is a positive constant independent of $h$ and $\tau$. Optimal estimates are also considered when the upwind numerical flux is used.

In this paper, we apply the local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method to solve the classical Keller-Segel (KS) chemotaxis model. The exact solution of the KS chemotaxis model may exhibit blow-up patterns with certain initial conditions, and is not easy to approximate numerically. Moreover, it has been proved that there exists a definition of free energy of the KS system which dissipates with respect to time. We will construct a consistent numerical energy and prove the energy dissipation with the LDG discretization. Several numerical experiments in one and two space dimensions will be given. Especially, for solutions with blow-up (converge to Dirac delta functions), the densities of KS model are computed to be strictly positive in the numerical experiments and the energies are also numerically observed to be strictly positive and decreasing as are seen in the figures. Therefore, the scheme is stable for the KS model with blow-up solutions.

Using the vorticity and stream function variables is an effective way to compute 2-D incompressible flow due to the facts that the incompressibility constraint for the velocity is automatically satisfied, the pressure variable is eliminated, and high order schemes can be efficiently implemented. However, a difficulty arises in a multi-connected computational domain in determining the constants for the stream function on the boundary of the “holes”. This is an especially challenging task for the calculation of unsteady flows, since these constants vary with time to reflect the total fluxes of the flow in each sub-channel. In this paper, we propose an efficient method in a finite difference setting to solve this problem and present some numerical experiments, including an accuracy check of a Taylor vortex-type flow, flow past a non-symmetric square, and flow in a heat exchanger.

In this paper, we propose a simple bound-preserving sweeping procedure for conservative numerical approximations. Conservative schemes are of importance in many applications, yet for high order methods, the numerical solutions do not necessarily satisfy maximum principle. This paper constructs a simple sweeping algorithm to enforce the bound of the solutions. It has a very general framework acting as a postprocessing step accommodating many point-based or cell average-based discretizations. The method is proven to preserve the bounds of the numerical solution while conserving a prescribed quantity designated as a weighted average of values from all points. The technique is demonstrated to work well with a spectral method, high order finite difference and finite volume methods for scalar conservation laws and incompressible flows. Extensive numerical tests in 1D and 2D are provided to verify the accuracy of the sweeping procedure.