We formulate an oversampled radial basis function generated finite difference (RBF-FD) method to solve time-dependent nonlinear conservation laws. The analytic solutions of these problems are known to be discontinuous, which leads to occurrence of no
n-physical oscillations (Gibbs phenomenon) that pollute the numerical solutions and can make them unstable. We address these difficulties using a residual based artificial viscosity stabilization, where the residual of the conservation law indicates the approximate location of the shocks. The location is then used to locally apply an upwind viscosity term, which stabilizes the Gibbs phenomenon and does not smear the solution away from the shocks. The proposed method is numerically tested and proves to be robust and accurate when solving scalar conservation laws and systems of conservation laws, such as compressible Euler equations.
The thoracic diaphragm is the muscle that drives the respiratory cycle of a human being. Using a system of partial differential equations (PDEs) that models linear elasticity we compute displacements and stresses in a two-dimensional cross section of
the diaphragm in its contracted state. The boundary data consists of a mix of displacement and traction conditions. If these are imposed as they are, and the conditions are not compatible, this leads to reduced smoothness of the solution. Therefore, the boundary data is first smoothed using the least-squares radial basis function generated finite difference (RBF-FD) framework. Then the boundary conditions are reformulated as a Robin boundary condition with smooth coefficients. The same framework is also used to approximate the boundary curve of the diaphragm cross section based on data obtained from a slice of a computed tomography (CT) scan. To solve the PDE we employ the unfitted least-squares RBF-FD method. This makes it easier to handle the geometry of the diaphragm, which is thin and non-convex. We show numerically that our solution converges with high-order towards a finite element solution evaluated on a fine grid. Through this simplified numerical model we also gain an insight into the challenges associated with the diaphragm geometry and the boundary conditions before approaching a more complex three-dimensional model.
Radial basis function generated finite difference (RBF-FD) methods for PDEs require a set of interpolation points which conform to the computational domain $Omega$. One of the requirements leading to approximation robustness is to place the interpola
tion points with a locally uniform distance around the boundary of $Omega$. However generating interpolation points with such properties is a cumbersome problem. Instead, the interpolation points can be extended over the boundary and as such completely decoupled from the shape of $Omega$. In this paper we present a modification to the least-squares RBF-FD method which allows the interpolation points to be placed in a box that encapsulates $Omega$. This way, the node placement over a complex domain in 2D and 3D is greatly simplified. Numerical experiments on solving an elliptic model PDE over complex 2D geometries show that our approach is robust. Furthermore it performs better in terms of the approximation error and the runtime vs. error compared with the classic RBF-FD methods. It is also possible to use our approach in 3D, which we indicate by providing convergence results of a solution over a thoracic diaphragm.
Localized collocation methods based on radial basis functions (RBFs) for elliptic problems appear to be non-robust in the presence of Neumann boundary conditions. In this paper we overcome this issue by formulating the RBF-generated finite difference
method in a discrete least-squares setting instead. This allows us to prove high-order convergence under node refinement and to numerically verify that the least-squares formulation is more accurate and robust than the collocation formulation. The implementation effort for the modified algorithm is comparable to that for the collocation method.
