We investigate the evolution of an almost flat membrane driven by competition of the homogeneous, Frank, and bending energies as wellas the coupling of the local order of the constituent molecules of the membrane to its curvature.We propose an alternative to the model in [J.B. Fournier and P. Galatoa, J. Phys. II7 (1997) 1509–1520; N. Uchida, Phys. Rev. E66 (2002) 040902] which replacesa Ginzburg-Landau penalization for the length of theorder parameter by a rigid constraint.We introduce a fully discrete scheme, consisting of piecewise linearfinite elements, show that it is unconditionally stable for a large range of the elastic moduli in the model, and prove its convergence(up to subsequences) thereby proving the existence of a weak solutionto the continuous model. Numerical simulations are included that examine typical model situations, confirm our theory, and explore numerical predictions beyond that theory.

For a class of anisotropic integrodifferential operators ${\cal B}$ arising as semigroup generators of Markov processes, we present a sparse tensor product wavelet compression scheme for the Galerkin finite element discretization of the corresponding integrodifferential equations ${\cal B}$ u = f on [0,1]n with possibly large n. Under certain conditions on ${\cal B}$ , the scheme is of essentially optimal and dimension independent complexity $\mathcal{O}$ (h -1| log h |2(n-1)) without corrupting the convergence or smoothness requirements of the original sparse tensor finite element scheme. If the conditions on ${\cal B}$ are not satisfied, thecomplexity can be bounded by $\mathcal{O}$ (h -(1+ε)), whereε $\ll 1$ tends to zero with increasing number of the wavelets' vanishing moments. Here h denotes the width of the corresponding finite element mesh. The operators under consideration are assumed to be of non-negative (anisotropic) order and admit a non-standard kernel κ $(\cdot,\cdot)$ that can be singular on all secondary diagonals. Practical examples of such operators from Mathematical Finance are given and some numerical results are presented.

In this paper, a weighted regularization method for the time-harmonic Maxwell equationswith perfect conducting or impedance boundary condition in composite materials is presented.The computational domain Ω is the unionof polygonal or polyhedral subdomains made of different materials. As a result, the electromagnetic field presents singularitiesnear geometric singularities, which are the interior and exterior edges and corners. The variational formulation of theweighted regularized problem is given on the subspace of ${\cal H}$ ( ${\bf curl}$ ;Ω)whose fields $\textit{\textbf{ u}}$ satisfy $w^\alpha$ div ( $\varepsilon{\textit{\textbf{u}}}$ )∈L2 (Ω) and have vanishing tangential traceor tangential trace in L2 ( $\partial\Omega$ ). The weight function $w(\bf x)$ is equivalentto the distance of $\bf x$ to the geometric singularities and the minimal weight parameter αis given in terms of the singular exponents of a scalar transmission problem.A density result is proven that guarantees the approximability of the solution field by piecewise regular fields.Numerical results for the discretization of the source problemby means of Lagrange Finite Elements of type P 1 and P 2 are given onuniform and appropriately refined two-dimensional meshes.The performance of the method in the case of eigenvalue problems is addressed.

The modelling and the numerical resolution of the electrical charging of aspacecraft in interaction with the Earth magnetosphere is considered. It involves the Vlasov-Poisson system, endowed with non standard boundary conditions. We discuss the pros and cons of several numerical methods for solving this system, using as benchmark a simple 1D model which exhibits the main difficulties of the original models.

Both the porous medium equation and the system of isentropic Euler equations can be considered as steepest descents on suitable manifolds of probability measures in the framework of optimal transport theory. By discretizing these variational characterizations instead of the partial differential equations themselves, we obtain new schemes with remarkable stability properties. We show that they capture successfully the nonlinear features of the flows, such as shocks and rarefaction waves for the isentropic Euler equations. We also show how to design higher order methods for these problems in the optimal transport setting using backward differentiation formula (BDF) multi-step methods or diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta methods.

The finite element approximation of optimal control problems forsemilinear elliptic partial differential equation is considered,where the control belongs to a finite-dimensional set and stateconstraints are given in finitely many points of the domain. Underthe standard linear independency condition on the active gradientsand a strong second-order sufficient optimality condition, optimalerror estimates are derived for locally optimal controls.

A discontinuous Galerkin finite element method for an optimalcontrol problem related to semilinear parabolic PDE's is examined.The schemes under consideration are discontinuous in time butconforming in space. Convergence of discrete schemes of arbitraryorder is proven. In addition, the convergence of discontinuousGalerkin approximations of the associated optimality system to thesolutions of the continuous optimality system is shown. The proofis based on stability estimates at arbitrary time points underminimal regularity assumptions, and a discrete compactnessargument for discontinuous Galerkin schemes (see Walkington[SINUM (June 2008) (submitted), preprint available at http://www.math.cmu.edu/~noelw], Sects. 3, 4).