The discrete maximum principle for linear simplicial finite element approximations of a reaction-diffusion problem (Q952026)

The authors study the reaction-diffusion problem \[ -\Delta u^g+gu^g=f\;\text{in}\;\Omega ,u^g=0\text{ on }\partial \Omega \] where \(u^g=u\left( g\right) \in C^2\left( \overline{\Omega }\right) \) and \( g\in C\left( \overline{\Omega }\right) ,g\geq 0.\) They provide a sufficient condition for the discrete maximum principle for a fully discrete linear simplicial finite element discretization. It explicitly bounds the dihedral angles and heights of simplices in the finite element partition in terms of the magnitude of the reaction coefficient and the spatial dimension. As a result, it can be computed how small the acute simplices should be for the discrete maximum principle to be valid.