English

On error estimates for Galerkin finite element methods for the Camassa-Holm equation

Numerical Analysis 2019-04-02 v2

Abstract

We consider the Camassa-Holm (CH) equation, a nonlinear dispersive wave equation that models one-way propagation of long waves of moderately small amplitude. We discretize in space the periodic initial-value problem for CH (written in its original and in system form), using the standard Galerkin finite element method with smooth splines on a uniform mesh, and prove optimal-order L2L^{2}-error estimates for the semidiscrete approximation. We also consider an initial-boundary-value problem on a finite interval for the system form of CH and analyze the convergence of its standard Galerkin semidiscretization. Using the fourth-order accurate, explicit, "classical" Runge-Kutta scheme for time-stepping, we construct a highly accurate, stable, fully discrete scheme that we employ in numerical experiments to approximate solutions of CH, mainly smooth travelling waves and nonsmooth solitons of the `peakon' type.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.10744,
  title  = {On error estimates for Galerkin finite element methods for the Camassa-Holm equation},
  author = {D. C. Antonopoulos and V. A. Dougalis and D. E. Mitsotakis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.10744},
  year   = {2019}
}