Positivity-preserving third order DG schemes for Poisson--Nernst--Planck equations

In this paper, we design and analyze third order positivity-preserving discontinuous Galerkin (DG) schemes for solving the time-dependent system of Poisson--Nernst--Planck (PNP) equations, which has found much use in diverse applications. Our DG method with Euler forward time discretization is shown to preserve the positivity of cell averages at all time steps. The positivity of numerical solutions is then restored by a scaling limiter in reference to positive weighted cell averages. The method is also shown to preserve steady states. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the third order accuracy and illustrate the positivity-preserving property in both one and two dimensions.