The space-time finite element method for parabolic problems (Q5947719)

The authors study the space-time finite element method for the semilinear parabolic problem \(u_t-\Delta u=f(u)\) in \(\Omega\times (0,T)\) together with initial and Dirichlet boundary conditions, where \(\Omega\subset \mathbb{R}^n\), \(f(u)\) is Lipschitz continuous and satisfies \(f(0)=0\). The method applied in the paper is based on a combination of finite element and finite difference techniques, and is continuous in space but discontinuous in time. The existence and uniqueness of the approximate solutions are proved by applying Brower's fixed point theorem, and the error estimate in \(L^\infty(L^2)\)-norm is obtained by using the standard discrete energy estimate techniques. Numerical results for \(f(u)=0\) and \(f(u)=2u\) are presented.