Stabilizing radial basis function methods for conservation laws using weakly enforced boundary conditions (Q2023705)

The article contains the investigation of global radial function methods (RBF) for hyperbolic conservation laws. It is well-knwon that strong enforced boundary conditions (BCs) may cause stability issues in global RBFs. Here, the authors proposed a technique to circumvent such stability issues by enforcing BC weakly. They start their investigation building RBF methods from a weak formulation similar to finite element methods and apply then the BC in such formulation. They could prove stability estimates for the analytical formulation (all integrals are calcualted exactly) and in the collocation approach focussing on a simple advection equation. In their studies they further realize that to ensure global conservation (important for hyperbolic conservation laws) the RBF approach have to include constants inside the approximation. In numerical simulations (advection in 1-2D, Euler equation in 1D) they verify their theoretical results. The authors used here ideas from FE discretizations combined with the RBF framework to obtain the desired properties, e.g. conservation and \(L^2\) stability. The paper can be seen as building bridge between the RBF and the FD/FE communities. A further extension of the method could be a global variation of their approach.