On Preservation of Positivity in Some Finite Element Methods for the Heat Equation
Journal article, 2015

We consider the initial boundary value problem for the homogeneous heat equation, with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. By the maximum principle the solution is nonnegative for positive time if the initial data are nonnegative. We complement in a number of ways earlier studies of the possible extension of this fact to spatially semidiscrete and fully discrete piecewise linear finite element discretizations, based on the standard Galerkin method, the lumped mass method, and the finite volume element method. We also provide numerical examples that illustrate our findings.

Spatially Semidiscrete

Finite Element Discretization

Positivity Preserving

Finite Volume Element Method

Lumped Mass

Fully Discrete

Finite Element Method

Heat Equation

Author

P Chatzipantelidis

University of Crete

Z. Horvath

Szechenyi Istvan Egyetem

Vidar Thomee

Chalmers, Mathematical Sciences, Mathematics

University of Gothenburg

Computational Methods in Applied Mathematics

1609-4840 (ISSN) 1609-9389 (eISSN)

Vol. 15 4 417-437

Subject Categories

Computational Mathematics

DOI

10.1515/cmam-2015-0018

More information

Latest update

7/8/2021 1