Are adaptive wavelet discretizations dissipative? Application to inviscid Burgers and incompressible Euler equations

Kai Schneider
Université d'Aix-Marseille
Centre de Mathématiques et d'Informatique

Adaptive wavelet schemes for solving partial differential equations offer an attractive possibility to introduce locally refined grids, which dynamically track the evolution of the solution in scale and space.
Automatic error control of the adaptive discretization, with respect to a uniform grid solution, is an advantageous feature. In this talk we focus on dynamical Galerkin schemes, where the projection operator changes over time. When selecting a subset of basis functions, the projection operator is non-differentiable and an integral formulation has to be used.
We will analyze the projected equations with respect to existence and uniqueness of the solution and prove that non-smooth projection operators introduce dissipation, a result which is crucial for adaptive discretizations of PDEs. For the Burgers equation we will illustrate numerically that thresholding the wavelet coefficients, and thus changing the projection space, will indeed introduce dissipation of energy. We discuss consequences for the so-called ``pseudo-adaptive" simulations, where time evolution and de-aliasing are done in Fourier space whilst thresholding is carried out in wavelet space. Applications will deal with the inviscid Burgers equation and the two- and three-dimensional incompressible Euler equations.

This is joint work with M. Farge, R. Nguyen van yen, R. Pereira, N.
Okamoto and K. Yoshimatsu.

Presentation (PDF File)

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