We propose a simple and efficient finite-difference method for the incompressible MHD equation. The numerical method combines the advantage of the MAC scheme for the Navier–Stokes equation and Yee's scheme for the Maxwell equation. In particular, the semi-discrete version of our scheme introduces no numerical dissipation and preserves the energy identity exactly.

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.

We give an elementary proof of the convergence of the point vortex method (PVM) to a classical weak solution for the two-dimensional incompressible Euler equations with initial vorticity being a finite Radon measure of distinguished sign and the initial velocity of locally bounded energy. This includes the important example of vortex sheets, which exhibits the classical Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. A surprise fact is that although the velocity fields generated by the point vortex method do not have bounded local kinetic energy, the limiting velocity field is shown to have a bounded local kinetic energy.

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.

In E & Liu (SIAM J Numer. Anal., 1995), we studied convergence and the structure of the error for several projection methods when the spatial variable was kept continuous (we call this the semi-discrete case). In this paper, we address similar questions for the fully discrete case when the spatial variables are discretized using a staggered grid. We prove that the numerical solution in velocity has full accuracy up to the boundary, despite the fact that there are numerical boundary layers present in the semi-discrete solutions.