A high-order discontinuous Galerkin in time discretization for second-order hyperbolic equations

TL;DR

This paper develops and analyzes a high-order discontinuous Galerkin method in time for second-order hyperbolic PDEs, combining it with finite element spatial discretization, and provides theoretical error estimates validated by numerical experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel high-order discontinuous Galerkin in time scheme for second-order hyperbolic PDEs and derives comprehensive error estimates for the combined space-time discretization.

Findings

Error estimates in energy and L2 norms are established.

Numerical experiments confirm theoretical convergence rates.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to apply a high-order discontinuous-in-time scheme to second-order hyperbolic partial differential equations (PDEs). We first discretize the PDEs in time while keeping the spatial differential operators undiscretized. The well-posedness of this semi-discrete scheme is analyzed and a priori error estimates are derived in the energy norm. We then combine this $hp$-version discontinuous Galerkin method for temporal discretization with an $H^1$-conforming finite element approximation for the spatial variables to construct a fully discrete scheme. A prior error estimates are derived both in the energy norm and the $L^2$-norm. Numerical experiments are presented to verify the theoretical results.