The shapes of vesicles formed by lipid bilayers with phase separation are governed by a bending energy with phase dependent material parameters together with a line energy associated with the phase interfaces. We present a numerical method to approximate solutions to the Euler-Lagrange equations featuring triangulated surfaces, isoparametric quadratic surface finite elements and the phase field approach for the phase separation. Furthermore, the method involves an iterative solution scheme that is based on a relaxation dynamics coupling a geometric evolution equation for the membrane surface with a surface Allen-Cahn equation. Remeshing and grid adaptivity are discussed, and in various simulations the influence of several physical parameters is investigated.

We formulate a one-dimensional time-dependent non-linear mathematical model for some types of physiological fluid flow in collapsible tubes with discontinuous material properties. The resulting 6 × 6 hyperbolic system is analysed and the associated Riemann problem is solved exactly. Although the solution algorithm deals with idealised cases, it is nonetheless uniquely well-suited for assessing the performance of numerical methods intended for simulating more general situations. Moreover, our model may be a useful starting point for numerical calculations of realistic flows involving rapid and discontinuous material property variations. One important example in mind is the simulation of blood flow in medium-to-large veins in humans. Finally, we also discuss some peculiarities of the model regarding the loss of strict hyperbolicity and uniqueness. In particular we show an example in which the solution of the Riemann problem is non unique.

We consider multi-physics computations where the Navier-Stokes equations of compressible fluid flow on some parts of the computational domain are coupled to the equations of elasticity on other parts of the computational domain. The different subdomains are separated by well-defined interfaces. We consider time accurate computations resolving all time scales. For such computations, explicit time stepping is very efficient. We address the issue of discrete interface conditions between the two domains of different physics that do not lead to instability, or to a significant reduction of the stable time step size. Finding such interface conditions is non-trivial.

We discretize the problem with high order centered difference approximations with summation by parts boundary closure. We derive L2 stable interface conditions for the linearized one dimensional discretized problem. Furthermore, we generalize the interface conditions to the full non-linear equations and numerically demonstrate their stable and accurate performance on a simple model problem. The energy stable interface conditions derived here through symmetrization of the equations contain the interface conditions derived through normal mode analysis by Banks and Sjögreen in [8] as a special case.

The additive Schwarz preconditioner with minimal overlap is extended to triangular spectral elements (TSEM). The method is a generalization of the corresponding method in tensorial quadrilateral spectral elements (QSEM). The proposed preconditioners are based on partitioning the domain into overlapping subdomains, solving local problems on these subdomains and solving an additional coarse problem associated with the subdomain mesh. The results of numerical experiments show that the proposed preconditioner are robust with respect to the number of elements and are more efficient than the preconditioners with generous overlaps.

In this article the instabilities appearing in a liquid layer are studied numerically by means of the linear stability method. The fluid is confined in an annular pool and is heated from below with a linear decreasing temperature profile from the inner to the outer wall. The top surface is open to the atmosphere and both lateral walls are adiabatic. Using the Rayleigh number as the only control parameter, many kind of bifurcations appear at moderately low Prandtl numbers and depending on the Biot number. Several regions on the Prandtl-Biot plane are identified, their boundaries being formed from competing solutions at codimension-two bifurcation points.

We study efficient spectral-collocation and continuation methods (SCCM) for rotating two-component Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) and rotating two-component BECs in optical lattices, where the second kind Chebyshev polynomials are used as the basis functions for the trial function space. A novel two-parameter continuation algorithm is proposed for computing the ground state and first excited state solutions of the governing Gross-Pitaevskii equations (GPEs), where the classical tangent vector is split into two constraint conditions for the bordered linear systems. Numerical results on rotating two-component BECs and rotating two-component BECs in optical lattices are reported. The results on the former are consistent with the published numerical results.

Algorithms for adaptive mesh refinement using a residual error estimator are proposed for fluid flow problems in a finite volume framework. The residual error estimator, referred to as the ℜ-parameter is used to derive refinement and coarsening criteria for the adaptive algorithms. An adaptive strategy based on the ℜ-parameter is proposed for continuous flows, while a hybrid adaptive algorithm employing a combination of error indicators and the ℜ-parameter is developed for discontinuous flows. Numerical experiments for inviscid and viscous flows on different grid topologies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms on arbitrary polygonal grids.

A multi-dimensionally upwind conservative Residual Distribution algorithm for simulating viscous axisymmetric hypersonic flows in thermo-chemical nonequilibrium on unstructured grids is presented and validated in the case of the complex flow-field over a double cone configuration. The resulting numerical discretization combines a state-of-the-art nonlinear quasi-monotone second order blended scheme for distributing the convective residual and a standard Galerkin formulation for the diffusive residual. The physical source terms are upwinded together with the convective fluxes. Numerical results show an excellent agreement with experimental measurements and available literature.

Numerical solutions of a non-Fickian diffusion equation belonging to a hyperbolic type are presented in one space dimension. The Brownian particle modelled by this diffusion equation is subjected to a symmetric periodic potential whose spatial shape can be varied by a single parameter. We consider a numerical method which consists of applying Laplace transform in time; we then obtain an elliptic diffusion equation which is discretized using a finite difference method. We analyze some aspects of the convergence of the method. Numerical results for particle density, flux and mean-square-displacement (covering both inertial and diffusive regimes) are presented.

A search was made for possible half-metallic (HM) antiferromagnet (AFM) in all the double perovskites structures of Sr2BB'O6 where BB' pairs are any combination of 3d, 4d or 5d transition elements with the exception of La. Sr can also be replaced by Ca or Ba whenever HM-AFM was found and similar calculations were then performed in order to probe further possibilities. It was found that A2MoOsO6, A2TcReO6, A2CrRuO6, where A=Ca, Sr, Ba, are all potential candidates for HM-AFM. The AFM of A2BB'O6 comes from both the superexchange mechanism and the generalized double exchange mechanism via the B(t2g)-O2pπ-B'(t2g) coupling, With the latter also being the origin of their HM. Also considered were the effects of spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and correlation (+U) by introducing +SOC and +U corrections. It is found that the SOC effect has much less influence than the correlation effect on the HM property of the compounds. For A2TcReO6 and A2CrRuO6, after +U, they become nearly Mott-Insulators. In the future, it is hoped that there will be further experimental confirmation for these possible HM-AFM candidates.

Numerical simulation of two-phase flow in fractured karst reservoirs is still a challenging issue. The triple-porosity model is the major approach up to now. However, the triple-continuum assumption in this model is unacceptable for many cases. In the present work, an efficient numerical model has been developed for immiscible two-phase flow in fractured karst reservoirs based on the idea of equivalent continuum representation. First, based on the discrete fracture-vug model and homogenization theory, the effective absolute permeability tensors for each grid blocks are calculated. And then an analytical procedure to obtain a pseudo relative permeability curves for a grid block containing fractures and cavities has been successfully implemented. Next, a full-tensor simulator has been designed based on a hybrid numerical method (combining mixed finite element method and finite volume method). A simple fracture system has been used to demonstrate the validity of our method. At last, we have used the fracture and cavity statistics data from TAHE outcrops in west China, effective permeability values and other parameters from our code, and an equivalent continuum simulator to calculate the water flooding profiles for more realistic systems.

In this paper, hp-adaptive finite element methods are studied for time-harmonic Maxwell’s equations. We propose the parallel hp-adaptive algorithms on conforming unstructured tetrahedral meshes based on residual-based a posteriori error estimates. Extensive numerical experiments are reported to investigate the efficiency of the hp-adaptive methods for point singularities, edge singularities, and an engineering benchmark problem of Maxwell’s equations. The hp-adaptive methods show much better performance than the h-adaptive method.

The variable high-order multiblock overlapping (overset) grids method of Sjögreen & Yee [CiCP, Vol. 5, 2009] for a perfect gas has been extended to nonequilibrium flows. This work makes use of the recently developed high-order well-balanced shock-capturing schemes and their filter counterparts [Wang et al., J. Comput. Phys., 2009, 2010] that exactly preserve certain non-trivial steady state solutions of the chemical nonequilibrium governing equations. Multiscale turbulence with strong shocks and flows containing both steady and unsteady components is best treated by mixing of numerical methods and switching on the appropriate scheme in the appropriate subdomains of the flow fields, even under the multiblock grid or adaptive grid refinement framework. While low dissipative sixth- or higher-order shock-capturing filter methods are appropriate for unsteady turbulence with shocklets, second- and third- order shock-capturing methods are more effective for strong steady or nearly steady shocks in terms of convergence. It is anticipated that our variable high-order overset grid framework capability with its highly modular design will allow for an optimum synthesis of these new algorithms in such a way that the most appropriate spatial discretizations can be tailored for each particular region of the flow. In this paper some of the latest developments in single block high-order filter schemes for chemical nonequilibrium flows are applied to overset grid geometries. The numerical approach is validated on a number of test cases characterized by hypersonic conditions with strong shocks, including the reentry flow surrounding a 3D Apollo-like NASA Crew Exploration Vehicle that might contain mixed steady and unsteady components, depending on the flow conditions.