Discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods for the Landau-de Gennes minimization problem of liquid crystals

Maity, Ruma Rani and Majumdar, Apala and Nataraj, Neela (2021) Discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods for the Landau-de Gennes minimization problem of liquid crystals. IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis, 41 (2). 1130–1163. ISSN 0272-4979 (https://doi.org/10.1093/imanum/draa008)

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Abstract

We consider a system of second order non-linear elliptic partial differential equations that models the equilibrium configurations of a two dimensional planar bistable nematic liquid crystal device. Discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods are used to approximate the solutions of this nonlinear problem with non-homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. A discrete inf-sup condition demonstrates the stability of the discontinuous Galerkin discretization of a well-posed linear problem. We then establish the existence and local uniqueness of the discrete solution of the non-linear problem. An a priori error estimates in the energy and L2 norm are derived and a best approximation property is demonstrated. Further, we prove the quadratic convergence of Newton’s iterates along with complementary numerical experiments.

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