On the preservation of invariants in the simulation of solitary waves in some nonlinear dispersive equations (Q430330)

The authors study the numerical simulation of solitary-wave solutions of two types of nonlinear dispersive wave equations, namely, Korteweg-deVries type and regularized long wave type, generalizing previous results obtained for specific equations. The generalization involves more general nonlinear and dispersive terms, as well as the decay of the solitary waves. The structure in time of the error in semidiscrete approximations is derived from the analysis of the linearization of the equations at the solitary waves. If \(r\) is the order of the method, then up to order \(2r-1\), the global error grows, in general, quadratically with time. The main source of time growth comes from the simulation of the parameters of the solitary wave: it is linear in the velocity and quadratic in the phase. When the numerical method preserves some invariants of the problem, the error in the velocity is bounded in time and the phase error grows linearly with time. This leads to a linear in time global error growth. These results can be used to obtain an asymptotic expression for the numerical approximation to solitary waves, which may help to describe the behavior in time of the numerical solution