Band 22, Heft 4 - Special Issue Dedicated to the Memory of Professor Francisco-Javier Sayas, Guest Editors: Gabriel N. Gatica, Norbert Heuer, and Salim Meddahi

This is the preface of a special issue dedicated to the memory of Francisco Javier Sayas who passed away on April 2, 2019. The articles reflect Sayas’ main research interests in the numerical analysis of partial differential equations, containing contributions on the scattering and propagation of acoustic and electromagnetic waves, and the analysis of discontinuous Galerkin schemes, boundary element methods, and coupled schemes. We discuss the main contributions of Sayas and give an overview of the results covered by this special issue.

Acoustic scattering of waves by bounded inhomogeneities in an unbounded homogeneous domain is considered. A symmetric coupled system of time-domain boundary integral equations and the second order formulation of the wave equation is described. A fully discrete system consists of spatial discretization by boundary and finite element methods (BEM/FEM), leapfrog time-stepping in the interior, and convolution quadrature for the boundary integral equations. Convolution quadrature is based on BDF2, trapezoidal rule, or a newly introduced truncated trapezoidal rule that has some favourable properties for both the implementation and quality of approximate solution. We give a stability and convergence analysis under a CFL condition of the fully discrete system. The theoretical results are illustrated by numerical experiments in two dimensions.

We present a new class of discontinuous Galerkin methods for the space discretization of the time-dependent Maxwell equations whose main feature is the use of time derivatives and/or time integrals in the stabilization part of their numerical traces. These numerical traces are chosen in such a way that the resulting semidiscrete schemes exactly conserve a discrete version of the energy. We introduce four model ways of achieving this and show that, when using the mid-point rule to march in time, the fully discrete schemes also conserve the discrete energy. Moreover, we propose a new three-step technique to devise fully discrete schemes of arbitrary order of accuracy which conserve the energy in time. The first step consists in transforming the semidiscrete scheme into a Hamiltonian dynamical system. The second step consists in applying a symplectic time-marching method to this dynamical system in order to guarantee that the resulting fully discrete method conserves the discrete energy in time. The third and last step consists in reversing the above-mentioned transformation to rewrite the fully discrete scheme in terms of the original variables.

In this work we present and analyze a finite element scheme yielding discontinuous Galerkin approximations to the solutions of the stationary Boussinesq system for the simulation of non-isothermal flow phenomena. The model consists of a Navier–Stokes-type system, describing the velocity and the pressure of the fluid, coupled to an advection-diffusion equation for the temperature. The proposed numerical scheme is based on the standard interior penalty technique and an upwind approach for the nonlinear convective terms and employs the divergence-conforming Brezzi–Douglas–Marini (BDM) elements of order k for the velocity, discontinuous elements of order k - 1 {k-1} for the pressure and discontinuous elements of order k for the temperature. Existence and uniqueness results are shown and stated rigorously for both the continuous problem and the discrete scheme, and optimal a priori error estimates are also derived. Numerical examples back up the theoretical expected convergence rates as well as the performance of the proposed technique.

In this paper, we show that the so-called Korn inequality holds for vector fields with a zero normal or tangential trace on a subset (of positive measure) of the boundary of Lipschitz domains. We further show that the validity of this inequality depends on the geometry of this subset of the boundary. We then consider three eigenvalue problems for the Lamé operator: we constrain the traction in the tangential direction and the normal component of the displacement, the related problem of constraining the normal component of the traction and the tangential component of the displacement, and a third eigenproblem that considers mixed boundary conditions. We show that eigenpairs for these eigenproblems exist on a broad variety of domains. Analytic solutions for some of these eigenproblems are given on simple domains.

This article considers a coupled finite and boundary element method for an interface problem for the acoustic wave equation. Well-posedness, a priori and a posteriori error estimates are discussed for a symmetric space-time Galerkin discretization related to the energy. Numerical experiments in three dimensions illustrate the performance of the method in model problems.

In this work, we construct an efficient numerical method to solve 3D Maxwell’s equations in coaxial cables. Our strategy is based upon a hybrid explicit-implicit time discretization combined with edge elements on prisms and numerical quadrature. One of the objectives is to validate numerically generalized telegrapher’s models that are used to simplify the 3D Maxwell equations into a 1D problem. This is the object of the second part of the article.

The time domain linear sampling method (TD-LSM) solves inverse scattering problems using time domain data by creating an indicator function for the support of the unknown scatterer. It involves only solving a linear integral equation called the near-field equation using different data from sampling points that probe the domain where the scatterer is located. To date, the method has been used for the acoustic wave equation and has been tested for several different types of scatterers, i.e. sound hard, impedance, and penetrable, and for waveguides. In this paper, we extend the TD-LSM to the time dependent Maxwell’s system with impedance boundary conditions – a similar analysis handles the case of a perfect electric conductor (PEC). We provide an analysis that supports the use of the TD-LSM for this problem, and preliminary numerical tests of the algorithm. Our analysis relies on the Laplace transform approach previously used for the acoustic wave equation. This is the first application of the TD-LSM in electromagnetism.

In this paper, we study numerical methods for simulating acoustic scattering by multiple three-dimensional objects of different nature (penetrable, sound-soft, sound-hard and absorbing targets) simultaneously present in the background media. We derive and analyze a boundary integral system of equations that arises when the solution of the problem is represented via single-layer potentials. We give abstract necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence of Petrov–Galerkin discretizations and show that spectral methods satisfy these conditions. Superalgebraic convergence order of the discrete method for smooth objects is illustrated in some test cases. After that, we tackle the inverse problem of finding the shape of objects of different unknown nature from measurements of the total field at a set of receptors. We propose a numerical algorithm based on the computation of the topological energy of a weighted multifrequency least squares cost functional and present some numerical examples to illustrate its capabilities.

In their article “Coupling at a distance HDG and BEM” , Cockburn, Sayas and Solano proposed an iterative coupling of the hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin method (HDG) and the boundary element method (BEM) to solve an exterior Dirichlet problem. The novelty of the numerical scheme consisted of using a computational domain for the HDG discretization whose boundary did not coincide with the coupling interface. In their article, the authors provided extensive numerical evidence for convergence, but the proof of convergence and the error analysis remained elusive at that time. In this article we fill the gap by proving the convergence of a relaxation of the algorithm and providing a priori error estimates for the numerical solution.

We develop a framework shedding light on common features of coupled variational formulations arising in electromagnetic scattering and acoustics. We show that spurious resonances haunting coupled domain-boundary formulations based on direct boundary integral equations of the first kind originate from the formal structure of their Calderón identities. Using this observation, the kernel of the coupled problem is characterized explicitly, and we show that it completely vanishes under the exterior representation formula.

Fractional PDEs have recently found several geophysics and imaging science applications due to their nonlocal nature and their flexibility in capturing sharp transitions across interfaces. However, this nonlocality makes it challenging to design efficient solvers for such problems. In this paper, we introduce a spectral method based on an ultraspherical polynomial discretization of the Caffarelli–Silvestre extension to solve such PDEs on rectangular and disk domains. We solve the discretized problem using tensor equation solvers and thus can solve higher-dimensional PDEs. In addition, we introduce both serial and parallel domain decomposition solvers. We demonstrate the numerical performance of our methods on a 3D fractional elliptic PDE on a cube as well as an application to optimization problems with fractional PDE constraints.