Discontinuous Galerkin timestepping for nonlinear parabolic problems

We study space–time finite element methods for semilinear parabolic problems in (1 + d)–dimensions for d = 2, 3. The discretisation in time is based on the discontinuous Galerkin timestepping method with implicit treatment of the linear terms and either implicit or explicit multistep discretisation of the zeroth order nonlinear reaction terms. Conforming finite element methods are used for the space discretisation. For this implicit-explicit IMEX–dG family of methods, we derive a posteriori and a priori energy-type error bounds and we perform extended numerical experiments. We derive a novel hp–version a posteriori error bounds in the L∞(L2) and L2(H1) norms assuming an only locally Lipschitz growth condition for the nonlinear reactions and no monotonicity of the nonlinear terms. The analysis builds upon the recent work in [60], for the respective linear problem, which is in turn based on combining the elliptic and dG reconstructions in [83, 84] and continuation argument. The a posteriori error bounds appear to be of optimal order and efficient in a series of numerical experiments. Secondly, we prove a novel hp–version a priori error bounds for the fully–discrete IMEX–dG timestepping schemes in the same setting in L∞(L2) and L2(H1) norms. These error bounds are explicit with respect to both the temporal and spatial meshsizes kn and h, respectively, and, where possible, with respect to the possibly varying temporal polynomial degree r. The a priori error estimates are derived using the elliptic projection technique with an inf-sup argument in time. Standard tools such as Grönwall inequality and discrete stability estimates for fully discrete semilinear parabolic problems with merely locally-Lipschitz continuous nonlinear reaction terms are used. The a priori analysis extends the applicability of the results from [52] to this setting with low regularity. The results are tested by an extensive set of numerical experiments