The authors establish error estimates for recently developed finite-element methods for incompressible viscous flow in domains with no-slip boundary conditions. The methods arise by discretization of a well-posed extended Navier-Stokes dynamics for which pressure is determined from current velocity and force fields. The methods use C1 elements for velocity and C0 elements for pressure. A stability estimate is proved for a related finite-element projection method close to classical time-splitting methods of Orszag, Israeli, DeVille and Karniadakis.

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The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the stability and error estimates of the local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) methods coupled with implicit-explicit (IMEX) time discretization schemes, for solving one-dimensional convection-diffusion equations with a nonlinear convection. Both Runge-Kutta and multi-step IMEX methods are considered. By the aid of the energy method, we show that the IMEX LDG schemes are unconditionally stable for the nonlinear problems, in the sense that the time-step $\dt$ is only required to be upper-bounded by a positive constant which depends on the flow velocity and the diffusion coefficient, but is independent of the mesh size $h$. We also give optimal error estimates for the IMEX LDG schemes, under the same temporal condition, if a monotone numerical flux is adopted for the convection. Numerical experiments are given to verify our main results.

We propose a simple fast spectral method for the Boltzmann collision operator with general collision kernels. In contrast to the direct spectral method [L. Pareschi and G. Russo, SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 37 (2000), pp. 1217–1245; I. M. Gamba and S. H. Tharkabhushanam, J. Comput. Phys., 228 (2009), pp. 2012–2036], which requires O(N6) memory to store precomputed weights and has O(N6) numerical complexity, the new method has complexity O(MN4 log N), where N is the number of discretization points in each of the three velocity dimensions and M is the total number of discretization points on the sphere and M ≪ N2. Furthermore, it requires no precomputation for the variable hard sphere model and only O(MN4) memory to store precomputed functions for more general collision kernels. Although a faster spectral method is available [C. Mouhot and L. Pareschi, Math. Comp., 75 (2006), pp. 1833–1852] (with complexity O(MN3 logN)), it works only for hard sphere molecules, thus limiting its use for practical problems. Our new method, on the other hand, can apply to arbitrary collision kernels. A series of numerical tests is performed to illustrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method.

In this paper, we develop and analyze an arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian discontinuous Galerkin (ALE-DG) method with a time-dependent approximation space for one dimensional conservation laws, which satisfies the geometric conservation law. For the semi-discrete ALE-DG method, when applied to nonlinear scalar conservation laws, a cell entropy inequality, L2 stability and error estimates are proven. More precisely, we prove the sub-optimal (k+1/2) convergence for monotone fluxes, and optimal (k+1) convergence for an upwind flux, when a piecewise P^k polynomial approximation space is used. For the fully-discrete ALE-DG method, the geometric conservation law and the local maximum principle are proven. Moreover, we state conditions for slope limiters, which ensure total variation stability of the method. Numerical examples show the capability of the method.