In this paper we discuss the derivation and use of local pressure boundary conditions for finite difference schemes for the unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in the velocity-pressure formulation. Their use is especially well suited for the computation of moderate to large Reynolds number flows. We explore the similarities between the implementation and use of local pressure boundary conditions and local vorticity boundary conditions in the design of numerical schemes for incompressible flow in 2D. In their respective formulations, when these local numerical boundary conditions are coupled with a fully explicit convectively stable time stepping procedure, the resulting methods are simple to implement and highly efficient. Unlike the vorticity formulation, the use of the local pressure boundary condition approach is readily applicable to 3D flows. The simplicity of the local pressure boundary condition approach and its easy adaptation to more general flow settings make the resulting scheme an attractive alternative to the more popular methods for solving the Navier-Stokes equations in the velocity-pressure formulation. We present numerical results of a second-order finite difference scheme on a nonstaggered grid using local pressure boundary conditions. Stability and accuracy of the scheme applied to Stokes flow is demonstrated using normal mode analysis. Also described is the extension of the method to variable density flows.

A very simple and efficient finite element method is introduced for two and three dimensional viscous incompressible flows using the vorticity formulation. This method relies on recasting the traditional finite element method in the spirit of the high order accurate finite difference methods introduced by the authors in another work. Optimal accuracy of arbitrary order can be achieved using standard finite element or spectral elements. The method is convectively stable and is particularly suited for moderate to high Reynolds number flows.

In this paper, we apply high-order finite difference (FD) schemes for multispecies and multireaction detonations (MMD). In MMD, the density and pressure are positive and the mass fraction of the ith species in the chemical reaction, say zi, is between 0 and 1, with ∑z_i=1. Due to the lack of maximum-principle, most of the previous bound-preserving technique cannot be applied directly. To preserve those bounds, we will use the positivity-preserving technique to all the z′is and enforce ∑z_i=1 by constructing conservative schemes, thanks to conservative time integrations and consistent numerical fluxes in the system. Moreover, detonation is an extreme singular mode of flame propagation in premixed gas, and the model contains a significant stiff source. It is well known that for hyperbolic equations with stiff source, the transition points in the numerical approximations near the shocks may trigger spurious shock speed, leading to wrong shock position. Intuitively, the high-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) scheme, which can suppress oscillations near the discontinuities, would be a good choice for spatial discretization. However, with the nonlinear weights, the numerical fluxes are no longer “consistent”, leading to nonconservative numerical schemes and the bound-preserving technique does not work. Numerical experiments demonstrate that, without further numerical techniques such as subcell resolutions, the conservative FD method with linear weights can yield better numerical approximations than the nonconservative WENO scheme.

A finite element method for computing viscous incompressible flows based on the gauge formulation introduced in [Weinan E, Liu J-G. Gauge method for viscous incompressible flows. Journal of Computational Physics (submitted)] is presented. This formulation replaces the pressure by a gauge variable. This new gauge variable is a numerical tool and differs from the standard gauge variable that arises from decomposing a compressible velocity field. It has the advantage that an additional boundary condition can be assigned to the gauge variable, thus eliminating the issue of a pressure boundary condition associated with the original primitive variable formulation. The computational task is then reduced to solving standard heat and Poisson equations, which are approximated by straightforward, piecewise linear (or higher-order) finite elements. This method can achieve high-order accuracy at a cost comparable with that of solving standard heat and Poisson equations. It is naturally adapted to complex geometry and it is much simpler than traditional finite element methods for incompressible flows. Several numerical examples on both structured and unstructured grids are presented. Copyright

We present a new perspective on graph-based methods for collaborative ranking for recommender systems. Unlike user-based or itembased methods that compute a weighted average of ratings given by the nearest neighbors, or lowrank approximation methods using convex optimization and the nuclear norm, we formulate matrix completion as a series of semi-supervised learning problems, and propagate the known ratings to the missing ones on the user-user or itemitem graph globally. The semi-supervised learning problems are expressed as Laplace-Beltrami equations on a manifold, or namely, harmonic extension, and can be discretized by a point integral method. We show that our approach does not impose a low-rank Euclidean subspace on the data points, but instead minimizes the dimension of the underlying manifold. Our method, named LDM (low dimensional manifold), turns out to be particularly effective in generating rankings of items, showing decent computational efficiency and robust ranking quality compared to state-ofthe- art methods.