The discontinuous Galerkin method for semilinear parabolic problems (Q4033718)

The authors propose a Galerkin scheme for an initial-boundary value problem corresponding to a semilinear (a smooth nonlinearity refers only to the unknown function and that does not affect its derivatives) parabolic equation. The use finite dimensional spaces with basis functions that are continuous in the space variables and discontinuous in time. They allow variable spatial meshes (that will change on each level time) and time steps. In fact they extend some earlier results of \textit{K. Eriksson} and \textit{C. Johnson} [SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 28, 43--77 (1991; Zbl 0732.65093)] to such nonlinear problems taking into account, essentially, the effect of numerical integration on a priori error analysis. A numerical example for a polynomial nonlinearity is carried out in the last section.