A coupled nonlinear finite element scheme for anisotropic diffusion equation with nonlinear capacity term

Abstract

A new nonlinear finite element method is studied to solve multi-dimensional anisotropic nonlinear diffusion equation with nonlinear capacity term, especially to secure a vivid simulation in the case of problems with transient physical quantities. In the scheme design, fully implicit two-layer coupled discretization is applied to assure high time accuracy, and finite element discretization is applied to assure high space accuracy. By introducing Ritz projection and new inductive reasoning methods, we develop the discrete functional analysis technique from that for finite difference schemes, and establish a new general analysis framework for nonlinear finite element schemes. Consequently, we overcome the difficulties arising from the strong coupling of the nonlinear finite element discretizations for the capacity term and diffusion operator, and prove the existence and boundedness of the nonlinear finite element solution, as well as its second-order time and optimal order space convergence. Numerical experiments and comparisons confirm the theoretical analysis results and demonstrate its high performance.