Finite volume methods for multi-symplectic PDEs (Q1587316)

A particular class of the vector-valued first order partial differential equations, namely multi-symplectic Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) are investigated. The application of a cell-vertex finite volume discretization to the PDEs of this type reduces to the Preissman box scheme used on a rectangular grid. For arbitrary quadrilateral grids it is shown that only methods with parallelogram-like finite volume cells lead to a multi-symplectic discretization, i.e. to a method that preserves a discrete conservation law of symplecticity. Involving variable meshes to finite volume methods is very effective and straightforward, but only meshes moving with a constant speed are multi-symplectic. To overcome this restriction the implementation of reversible moving mesh based on a semi-Lagrangian approach is proposed. Numerical examples for a one-dimensional dispersive shallow-water system using the presented discretization are also included.