Energy-stable global radial basis function methods on summation-by-parts form (Q6178639)

The energy stability of global radial basis function (RBF) methods for time-dependent partial differential equations is investigated. Unlike finite differences or finite element methods, RBF schemes are mesh-free, making them very flexible with respect to the geometry of the computational domain since the only used geometrical property is the pairwise distance between two centers. The article is outlined as follows. The Section 1 is an Introduction. In Section 2, some preliminaries on the energy stability of initial-boundary-value problems and global RBF methods are provided. The concept of FSBP operators is shortly revisited in Section 3. The FSBP theory to RBF function spaces is adapted in Section 4. Here, it is also demonstrated that many existing RBF methods do not satisfy the summation-by-parts (SBP) property and how to construct RBF operators in SBP form (RBFSBP). In Section 5, some concrete examples of RBFSBP operators resulting in energy-stable methods are given. Finally, numerical tests are provided in Section 6, and concluding thoughts in Section 7.