A novel discontinuous Galerkin projection scheme for the hydrodynamics of nematic liquid crystals

Abstract

This paper is focused on the numerical approximations for the hydrodynamic model of nematic liquid crystals. Under the framework of a splitting projection method, we propose a novel interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for solving the coupled system, which is employed by combining the scalar auxiliary variables (SAV) approach, implicit-explicit (IMEX) treatments and a rotational pressure-correction method. One prominent feature of the developed scheme here is by introducing an additional stabilization term artificially in liquid crystal equation to balance the explicit treatment for the coupling term, so that the computations of vector field from velocity field are decoupled. Hence a linear, fully decoupled and unconditionally energy-stable DG scheme can be achieved in a fully discrete manner. We show that the resulting scheme is uniquely solvable and unconditional energy stable, and the optimal error estimates of the proposed scheme are further proved theoretically. Finally, numerical results are carried out to demonstrate the accuracy and energy stability of our scheme.