TY - JOUR T1 - A Discontinuous Ritz Method for a Class of Calculus of Variations Problems AU - Feng , Xiaobing AU - Schnake , Stefan JO - International Journal of Numerical Analysis and Modeling VL - 2 SP - 340 EP - 356 PY - 2018 DA - 2018/10 SN - 16 DO - http://doi.org/ UR - https://global-sci.org/intro/article_detail/ijnam/12807.html KW - Variational problems, minimizers, discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods, DG finite element numerical calculus, compactness, convergence. AB -

This paper develops an analogue (or counterpart) to discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for approximating a general class of calculus of variations problems. The proposed method, called the discontinuous Ritz (DR) method, constructs a numerical solution by minimizing a discrete energy over DG function spaces. The discrete energy includes standard penalization terms as well as the DG finite element (DG-FE) numerical derivatives developed recently by Feng, Lewis, and Neilan in [7]. It is proved that the proposed DR method converges and that the DG-FE numerical derivatives exhibit a compactness property which is desirable and crucial for applying the proposed DR method to problems with more complex energy functionals. Numerical tests are provided on the classical $p$-Laplace problem to gauge the performance of the proposed DR method.