Discrete maximum principle for interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin methods (Q1945356)

This is probably the first paper devoted to the discrete maximum principle (DMP) for the discontinuous Galerkin method. It overviews the definitions and results for the continuous and discrete maximum principles for elliptic operators and their finite element discretizations. Then the authors consider the one-dimensional reaction-diffusion operator \(K u = -(p u')' + k^2 u\) with constants \(p>0\) and \(k\) and discretize it by the interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin method. The main result provides conditions for the validity of the DMP for the resulting discrete operator. These conditions are formulated in therms of the parameters \(p\), \(k\), penalty parameter and the mesh size. Finally, a numerical example is presented.