Discrete minimum and maximum principles for finite element approximations of non-monotone elliptic equations (Q1769081)

The authors derive uniform lower and upper bounds for positive finite element approximations to semilinear elliptic equations in several space dimensions with mixed Dirichlet-Neumann boundary conditions. The nonlinearity may be non-monotone and unbounded. With some structure conditions on the non-linearity and the triangulation the discrete minimum principle provides a positive-preserving approximations if the discretization parameter if small enough. The maximum principle also holds for degenerate diffusion coefficients.