Recovering the uniform boundary observability with spectral Legendre-Galerkin formulations of the 1-D wave equation

TL;DR

This paper investigates methods to recover uniform boundary observability in spectral Legendre-Galerkin discretizations of the 1-D wave equation, proposing cheaper alternatives to Fourier filtering and analyzing their effectiveness.

Contribution

It introduces three cost-effective methods—spectral filtering, mixed formulation, and Nitsche's method—to restore uniform boundary observability in spectral discretizations of the wave equation.

Findings

Spectral filtering, mixed formulation, and Nitsche's method recover uniform boundary observability.

None of the methods provide a uniform direct (trace) inequality.

Control convergence holds despite the lack of a uniform trace inequality.

Abstract

For a Legendre-Galerkin semi-discretization of the 1-D homogeneous wave equation, the high frequency components of the numerical solution prevent us from obtaining the boundary observability (inequality), uniformly with regard to the discretization parameter. A classical Fourier filtering that filters out the high frequencies is sufficient to recover the uniform observability. Unfortunately, this remedy needs to compute all the frequencies of the underlying system. In this paper we present three cheaper alternative remedies, namely a spectral filtering, a mixed formulation and Nitsche's method to append Dirichlet type boundary conditions. Our numerical results show indeed that uniform boundary observability inequalities may be recovered. On another hand, surprisingly, none of them seems to provide a uniform direct (or trace) inequality, a property which is needed in some existing general convergence results for the adjoint boundary controllability problem. We finally show in a numerical example that, despite this fact, convergence of the control approximations holds whenever the uniform observability inequality is observed numerically.