Abstract of
Antisymmetry, pseudospectral methods, weighted residual discretizations, and energy conserving partial differential equations
by Robert McLachlan and Nicolas Robidoux

In view of its influence on the stability of numerical integrators, the dual composition method for producing energy-preserving discretizations of conservative PDEs, which generalizes the summation by parts approach, is introduced. Dual composition discretizations involve two compatible weighted residual approximations: one which targets variational derivatives of (nonlinear) functionals, and one which targets linear differential operators. In the simplest cases, it coincides with a pseudospectral, Galerkin, discretization. In general, however, the resulting differentiation matrices are not the standard pseudospectral---or the standard Galerkin---ones. Nonetheless, fast implementations can sometimes be recovered.
The emphasis is on pseudospectral bases; however, spectral and finite element bases are also discussed. Fourier antialiasing is shown to make some discretizations conservative; a Chebyshev grid version is presented. Semi-discretizations of the one-way and the inhomogeneous wave equations on the interval are discussed. Several semi-discretizations, some of them Hamiltonian, of the Korteweg-de Vries equation on the circle are compared. The shortcomings of quadrature approximations of energy functionals are discussed.



Complaints to nrobidou@netscape.net (Nicolas Robidoux)

December 18, 2000.