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In this paper, an analysis of the superconvergence property of the semidiscrete discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method applied to one-dimensional time-dependent nonlinear scalar conservation laws is carried out. We prove that the error between the DG solution and a particular projection of the exact solution achieves $\left(k + \frac32\right)$-th order superconvergence when upwind fluxes are used. The results hold true for arbitrary nonuniform regular meshes and for piecewise polynomials of degree $k$ ($k \ge 1$), under the condition that $|f'(u)|$ possesses a uniform positive lower bound. Numerical experiments are provided to show that the superconvergence property actually holds true for nonlinear conservation laws with general flux functions, indicating that the restriction on $f(u)$ is artificial.

We introduce and analyze two new semi-discrete numerical methods for the multi-dimensional Vlasov-Poisson system. The schemes are constructed by combing a discontinuous Galerkin approximation to the Vlasov equation together with a mixed finite element method for the Poisson problem. We show optimal error estimates in the case of smooth compactly supported initial data. We propose a scheme that preserves the total energy of the system.

High order path-conservative schemes have been developed for solving nonconservative hyperbolic systems. Recently, it has been observed that this approach may have some computational issues and shortcomings. In this paper, a modification to the high order path-conservative scheme in is proposed to improve its computational performance and to overcome some of the shortcomings. This modification is based on the high order finite volume WENO scheme with subcell resolution and it uses an exact Riemann solver to catch the right paths at the discontinuities. An application to one-dimensional compressible two-medium flows of nonconservative or primitive Euler equations is carried out to show the effectiveness of this new approach.

Lagrangian methods are widely used in many fields for multi-material compressible flow simulations such as in astrophysics and inertial confinement fusion (ICF), due to their distinguished advantage in capturing material interfaces automatically. In some of these applications, multiple internal energy equations such as those for electron, ion and radiation are involved. In the past decades, several staggered-grid based Lagrangian schemes have been developed which are designed to solve the internal energy equation directly. These schemes can be easily extended to solve problems with multiple internal energy equations. However such schemes are typically not conservative for the total energy. Recently, significant progress has been made in developing cell-centered Lagrangian schemes which have several good properties such as conservation for all the conserved variables and easiness for remapping. However, these schemes are commonly designed to solve the Euler equations in the form of the total energy, therefore they cannot be directly applied to the solution of either the single internal energy equation or the multiple internal energy equations without significant modifications. Such modifications, if not designed carefully, may lead to the loss of some of the nice properties of the original schemes such as conservation of the total energy. In this paper, we establish an equivalency relationship between the cell-centered discretizations of the Euler equations in the forms of the total energy and of the internal energy. By a carefully designed modification in the implementation, the cell-centered Lagrangian scheme can be used to solve the compressible fluid flow with one or multiple internal energy equations and meanwhile it does not lose its total energy conservation property. An advantage of this approach is that it can be easily applied to many existing large application codes which are based on the framework of solving multiple internal energy equations. Several two dimensional numerical examples for both Euler equations and three-temperature hydrodynamic equations in cylindrical coordinates are presented to demonstrate the performance of the scheme in terms of symmetry preserving, accuracy and non-oscillatory performance.

To easily generalize the maximum-principle-satisfying schemes for scalar conservation laws to convection diffusion equations, we propose a non-conventional high order finite volume weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) scheme which can be proven maximum-principle-satisfying. Two-dimensional extensions are straightforward. We also show that the same idea can be used to construct high order schemes preserving the maximum principle for two-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in the vorticity stream-function formulation. Numerical tests for the fifth order WENO schemes are reported.

In earlier work, two of the authors developed a high order accurate numerical boundary condition procedure for hyperbolic conservation laws, which allows the computation using high order finite difference schemes on Cartesian meshes to solve problems in arbitrary physical domains whose boundaries do not coincide with grid lines. This procedure is based on the so-called inverse Lax-Wendroff (ILW) procedure for inflow boundary conditions and high order extrapolation for outflow boundary conditions. However, the algebra of the ILW procedure is quite heavy for two dimensional (2D) hyperbolic systems, which makes it difficult to implement the procedure for order of accuracy higher than three. In this paper, we first discuss a simplified and improved implementation for this procedure, which uses the relatively complicated ILW procedure only for the evaluation of the first order normal derivatives. Fifth order WENO type extrapolation is used for all other derivatives, regardless of the direction of the local characteristics and the smoothness of the solution. This makes the implementation of a fifth order boundary treatment practical for 2D systems with source terms. For no-penetration boundary condition of compressible inviscid flows, a further simplification is discussed, in which the evaluation of the tangential derivatives involved in the ILW procedure is avoided. We test our simplified and improved boundary treatment for Euler equations with or without source terms representing chemical reactions in detonations. The results demonstrate the designed fifth order accuracy, stability, and good performance for problems involving complicated interactions between detonation/shock waves and solid boundaries.

In our earlier work, we constructed uniformly high order accurate discontinuous Galerkin (DG) and finite volume schemes which preserve positivity of density and pressure for the Euler equations of compressible gas dynamics. In this paper, we present an extension of this framework to construct positivity-preserving high order essentially non-oscillatory (ENO) and weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) finite difference schemes for compressible Euler equations. General equations of state and source terms are also discussed. Numerical tests of the fifth order finite difference WENO scheme are reported to demonstrate the good behavior of such schemes.

The entropy solutions of the compressible Euler equations satisfy a minimum principle for the specific entropy. First order schemes such as Godunov-type and Lax-Friedrichs schemes and the second order kinetic schemes also satisfy a discrete minimum entropy principle. In this paper, we show an extension of the positivity-preserving high order schemes for the compressible Euler equations, to enforce the minimum entropy principle for high order finite volume and discontinuous Galerkin (DG) schemes.

In this paper, we introduce a general approach for proving optimal $L^2$ error estimates for the semi-discrete local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) methods solving linear high order wave equations. The optimal order of error estimates hold not only for the solution itself but also for the auxiliary variables in the LDG method approximating the various order derivatives of the solution. Several examples including the one-dimensional third order wave equation, one-dimensional fifth order wave equation, and multi-dimensional Schr\"{o}dinger equation are explored to demonstrate this approach. The main idea is to derive energy stability for the various auxiliary variables in the LDG discretization, via using the scheme and its time derivatives with different test functions. Special projections are utilized to eliminate the jump terms at the cell boundaries in the error estimate in order to achieve the optimal order of accuracy.

One of the main challenges in computational simulations of gas detonation propagation is that negative density or negative pressure may emerge during the time evolution, which will cause blow-ups. Therefore, schemes with provable positivity-preserving of density and pressure are desired. First order and second order positivity-preserving schemes were well studied. For high order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method, even though the characteristicwise TVB limiter can kill oscillations, it is not sufficient to maintain the positivity. A simple solution for arbitrarily high order positivity-preserving schemes solving Euler equations was proposed recently. In this paper, we first discuss an extension of the technique to design arbitrarily high order positivity-preserving DG schemes for reactive Euler equations. We then present a simpler and more robust implementation of the positivity-preserving limiter than the one before. Numerical tests, including very demanding examples in gaseous detonations, indicate that the third order DG scheme with the new positivity-preserving limiter produces satisfying results even without the TVB limiter.