Local discontinuous Galerkin methods for nonlinear dispersive equations

We develop local discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for solving nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations that have compactly supported traveling waves solutions, the so-called “compactons”. The schemes we present extend the previous works of Yan and Shu on approximating solutions for linear dispersive equations and for certain KdV-type equations. We present two classes of DG methods for approximating solutions of such PDEs. First, we generate nonlinearly stable numerical schemes with a stability condition that is induced from a conservation law of the PDE. An alternative approach is based on constructing linearly stable schemes, i.e., schemes that are linearly stable to small perturbations. The numerical simulations we present verify the desired properties of the methods including their expected order of accuracy. In particular, we demonstrate the potential advantages of using DG methods over pseudo-spectral methods in situations where discontinuous fronts and rapid oscillations co-exist in a solution.