A dichotomy of finite element spaces and its application to an energy-conservative scheme for the regularized long wave equation

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Hauptverfasser: Antonopoulos, Dimitrios, Mitsotakis, Dimitrios
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Antonopoulos, Dimitrios
Mitsotakis, Dimitrios
author_facet Antonopoulos, Dimitrios
Mitsotakis, Dimitrios
contents Certain energy-conservative Galerkin discretizations for nonlinear dispersive wave equations have revealed an unusual convergence behavior: optimal convergence is attained when continuous Lagrange finite element spaces of odd polynomial degree are employed, whereas the use of even-degree polynomials leads to reduced accuracy. The present work demonstrates that this behavior is intrinsic to the structure of the finite element spaces themselves. In particular, it is shown to be closely connected to the standard $L^2$-projection of derivatives, which possesses a super-approximation property exclusively for odd polynomial degrees. We also examine the implications of this feature for an energy-conservative Galerkin approximation of the regularized long-wave equation where the energy is a cubic functional. Although the resulting scheme conserves both mass and energy, we further show that the impulse is approximated with high accuracy, and we establish {\em a priori} error bounds for the associated semi-discrete formulation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_20737
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A dichotomy of finite element spaces and its application to an energy-conservative scheme for the regularized long wave equation
Antonopoulos, Dimitrios
Mitsotakis, Dimitrios
Numerical Analysis
Certain energy-conservative Galerkin discretizations for nonlinear dispersive wave equations have revealed an unusual convergence behavior: optimal convergence is attained when continuous Lagrange finite element spaces of odd polynomial degree are employed, whereas the use of even-degree polynomials leads to reduced accuracy. The present work demonstrates that this behavior is intrinsic to the structure of the finite element spaces themselves. In particular, it is shown to be closely connected to the standard $L^2$-projection of derivatives, which possesses a super-approximation property exclusively for odd polynomial degrees. We also examine the implications of this feature for an energy-conservative Galerkin approximation of the regularized long-wave equation where the energy is a cubic functional. Although the resulting scheme conserves both mass and energy, we further show that the impulse is approximated with high accuracy, and we establish {\em a priori} error bounds for the associated semi-discrete formulation.
title A dichotomy of finite element spaces and its application to an energy-conservative scheme for the regularized long wave equation
topic Numerical Analysis
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20737