A postprocess based improvement of the spectral element method (Q1973791)

An important contribution for the numerical solution of dissipative partial differential equations is the use of approximate inertial manifolds in the so-called nonlinear Galerkin discretizations that improve their higher convergence rate. In this paper a postprocess of the spectral element method for time-dependent dissipative equations is proposed. This new approach consists of computing the Galerkin approximation based on a space of piecewise polynomials of degree \(N\) by numerically integrating the equation in the time interval \([0,T]\) and then postprocess by solving at the final time \(T\) a discrete linear elliptic problem on a space of piecewise polynomials of degree \(M>N\). The rate of convergence of the resulting method is proved to be \( \max ( N^{-s-1}, M^{-s})\). The overcost of the postprocessed procedure is negligible and the resulting method is really an improvement over the standard spectral element discretization. umerical experiments showing this advantage of the new method are presented.