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.

Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) uses the phase data in magnetic resonance signals to visualize a three-dimensional susceptibility distribution by solving the magnetic field to susceptibility inverse problem. Due to the presence of zeros of the integration kernel in the frequency domain, QSM is an ill-posed inverse problem. Although numerous regularization-based models have been proposed to overcome this problem, incompatibility in the field data, which leads to deterioration of the recovery, has not received enough attention. In this paper, we show that the data acquisition process of QSM inherently generates a harmonic incompatibility in the measured local field. Based on this discovery, we propose a novel regularization-based susceptibility reconstruction model with an additional sparsity-based regularization term on the harmonic incompatibility. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method achieves better performance than existing approaches.

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The immersed boundary method has evolved into one of the most useful computational methods in studying fluid structure interaction. On the other hand, the immersed boundary method is also known to suffer from a severe timestep stability restriction when using an explicit time discretization. In this paper, we propose several efficient semi-implicit schemes to remove this stiffness from the immersed boundary method for the two-dimensional Stokes flow. First, we obtain a novel unconditionally stable semi-implicit discretization for the immersed boundary problem. Using this unconditionally stable discretization as a building block, we derive several efficient semi-implicit schemes for the immersed boundary problem by applying the small scale decomposition to this unconditionally stable discretization. Our stability analysis and extensive numerical experiments show that our semi-implicit schemes offer much better stability property than the explicit scheme. Unlike other implicit or semi-implicit schemes proposed in the literature, our semi-implicit schemes can be solved explicitly in the spectral space. Thus the computational cost of our semi-implicit schemes is comparable to that of an explicit scheme, but with a much better stability property.

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.