Abstract
In this paper, we present a new mixed weak Galerkin FEM for Maxwell’s equations in the primary electrostatic field–Lagrange multiplier. Our numerical scheme is equipped with stable finite elements composed of polynomials of degree ℓ for the electrostatic variable and polynomials of degree for the Lagrange multiplier variable; the electrostatic field and the Lagrange multiplier variables are discontinuous. We demonstrate some error estimations that are optimal as a function of the mesh size and we study some numerical tests in a 2D domain. The numerical results perfectly confirm those shown theoretically.
Keywords:
weak Galerkin formulations; weak differential operators; mixed FE methods; Maxwell’s equations MSC:
65N30; 65N15; 35J20; 35J47
1. Introduction
Recently, Wang and Ye [1] introduced a method for the resolution of partial differential equations, labeled the weak Galerkin finite element method. Several researchers have used the weak Galerin finite element method for approximating solutions of PDEs such as parabolic equations [2,3,4,5] and elliptic interface problems [6,7]. Recently, in [8], the authors introduce a new formulation based on WG-FEM, which discretizes the second order elliptic equation in non-mixed form directly. The mixed WG-FEM is an extension of the WG-FEM [9] and it was used for solving partial differential equations such as modified Maxwell’s equations [10] and Stokes problems [11,12,13,14]. There are recent numerical techniques for the resolution of Maxwell’s equations, for example, in [15], where the authors present a review on some recent progress achieved for simulating Maxwell’s equation, in [16], where an augmented mixed discontinuous Galerkin formulation for approximating the electric field is presented and analyzed, and in [17], the authors present a numerical study of conforming spacetime methods for Maxwell’s equations.
In this paper, we are interested to the following problem: Let be a 2-dimensional bounded convex polygon or a 3-dimensional bounded polyhedral domain and its boundary, and then find the field u which satisfies
where is a subset of , n is the unit outward on , J is a current density, and and are the magnetic permeability and the electric permittivity of the medium, respectively. We assume that these coefficients are smooth, non-negative functions and in . For a given non-zero frequency w, u is relied to the electric field E by the relation . is any positive bounded function and may be considered zero almost in and p is a Lagrange multiplier. For the case where , the term vanishes and the remaining problem is derived from Maxwell’s equations.
This paper is presented as follows: In following section, we introduce spaces and notations that are essential for the derivation of the WG formulation. Also, in this section, we present in detail our mixed weak Galerkin scheme. Section 3 discusses the properties of the bilinear forms defined in the numerical scheme and in Section 4, we analyze the convergence and prove some optimal error estimations. These theoretical convergence results were tested and confirmed numerically in Section 5.
2. Mixed FE Method
2.1. Notations and Meshes
Given a domain D, we keep notations for Sobolev spaces as in [18,19]. For the spaces , , and their subspaces, we refer to [20,21,22,23]. Assume that is a subdivision of D into triangles if and into tetrahedra if . We also assume that is the regular shape and satisfies the hypothesis (A1)–(A4) given in [1]. Denote by the set of all interior boundary elements of the partition and the set of all exterior boundary elements of the partition and . We consider the piecewise Sobolev spaces as
2.2. Weak Galerkin Discretization
Let , for an approximation of the electrostatic field
and its subspace
For the Lagrange multiplier, we approximate it in the finite element space
Now, let us define the weak operators. For and as two arbitrary elements, we denote the weak curl differential operator as the only polynomial, satisfying
A weak divergence is considered as the only polynomial such that
With the previous notations and the last definitions of weak differential operators, we can consider an approximation of (1) as follows: Find , satisfying
Clearly, this last system is no longer consistent due to an insufficient enforcement of the components and . Therefore, some stabilization terms must be added and we stabilize the bilinear form
by requiring some communications between and . Hence, we introduce the following bilinear forms:
where is an arbitrary real parameter. Now, we consider an approximation of (1) as follows: Find and , satisfying
with
3. Solvability and Stability
Let us start by introducing the local projection operators. Define and as the local projection operators on every elements T of and e of , respectively. is the -projection of defined as For , we denote by its local projection operator from . In the following part of this section, we study the properties of bilinear forms. We start by defining norms, which are necessary for our study. For , we use the usual norm , while for , we define the norm of q as
Using the classical techniques and the last definition of , we can show that and B are continuous on spaces and , respectively, while the coercivity of on follows from the definition of the triple bar norm . Therefore, for an application of the Babuška–Brezzi theory, an inf-sup condition for B remains to be shown.
Lemma 1.
We have
with a positive constant ϱ independent of h.
Proof.
Fix as an element of , then and we know [13,24] that there exists v in with Let and let us prove that . Using the fact that is bounded, one can obtain
For an estimation of the norms of the weak differential operators and , as in [13], we have shown that
Then, we write
and
Now, for an estimation of , introduce the notations and and remark that
and then
Therefore
Similarly, one can obtain
From (7), (8), (9), (11), and (12), we deduce that
From the definition of and Lemma 2 given in next section, we obtain
□
4. Error Estimate
Let us first recall the trace inequality [9], for every K in and for any e in , one has
Now, we introduce the next Lemma, which plays a paramount role in our study of error estimations.
Lemma 2.
Assume that u and p satisfy (1), then
Proof.
The proof follows similar techniques given in [13]. □
4.1. Error Equations
Our objective here is to demonstrate some error equations which are necessary for establishing optimal error estimation for our mixed weak Galerkin discrete scheme (5). In order to simplify the calculations, we assume that parameters , are constants and to be congruent to the identity, so almost in . is a solution of (1), which is assumed to be sufficiently regular. Using Lemma 2, Equation (2), and integrating parts, we can arrive to
Also from Equation (3), the classical integration of parts based on the formula and since is null, we obtain (see [13])
Therefore
Now, multiplying the first equation of (1) with in , we obtain
The addition of the term to (16) means
Since and using an integration by parts, it is straightforward to obtain after an integration by parts and (14)
The last equation and (15) substituted into (17) gives
Now, multiply the second equation in (1) with and obtain
which means
and it follows after the addition of Equations (18) and (19) that
Now, it is time to introduce and prove the error equations.
Lemma 3.
We have
with and are the errors.
4.2. Error Estimations
In the following theorem, we prove some optimal order error estimations for the electrostatic variable and the Lagrange multiplier variable in the norm and the standard norm, respectively. Also, we give an error estimation result for the electrostatic field .
Theorem 1.
Proof.
Let us begin by introducing the two inequality types valid for and ; we refer to [9] for the detail of their proofs.
Next, introduce the linear form defined by
Therefore, the error equations in Lemma 3 may be written as the form
Since the two bilinear forms and B satisfy all conditions of the well-known Babuška and Brezzi theory, it follows that Thus, it is sufficient to bound . For an estimation of the term , since is bounded, , the first inequality in (22) and the definition of obtain
From the definition of the projection operators , , Cauchy Schwarz inequality, (10), (13), and (22), one can arrive to (see [13] for similar details)
and
and from the two last estimations, we deduce that
Now, let us find an estimation of ; for simplicity of writing, we denote this term by . Apply the Cauchy Schwarz inequality, then
Using the definition of , the trace inequality (13), we can arrive at
Next, we use (22) for and write
The last technique may be applied for finding an estimation of the term without difficulty and we obtain
From the previous estimations and the general saddle point problem of Babuška–Brezzi theory, the first inequality in Theorem 1 follows immediately and for the norm estimation, we can apply the same technique presented in [9,11] for the Laplacien operator. □
5. Numerical Tests
Now, we test numerically the model partial differential Equation (1) in a two dimensional space ; our results were obtained using Matlab software. Here, is considered as partitioned into a uniform triangulation with equal size , . The parameters and are assumed to be constants and to be equal to one, so and . In the principal bilinear form A, a multiplicative coefficient parameter appears. This parameter is chosen to be equal to one, so in all of the following examples. Note that for any choice of that is not very large, the matrix associated with A is well conditioned and non-singular. For the cases where and are studied separately, we present two examples for the case where is null in and two examples for the case . The solutions , are discritized with the piecewise polynomials on every triangle and edge, respectively. p is approximated with the piecewise polynomial functions on every triangle.
5.1. Example 1
In this example, we take and a source J so that the true solution is and We show the results in Table 1.
Table 1.
Numerical values for example 1.
5.2. Example 2
Also here is taken to be equal to zero, where the solution of (1) is and We show the values in Table 2.
Table 2.
Numerical values for example 2.
5.3. Example 3
Here, we choose and a source J so that the true solution is and The results of convergence for this example are listed in Table 3.
Table 3.
Numerical values for example 3.
5.4. Example 4
Here is taken as and the manufactured solution of (1) is chosen as and . The errors are shown in Table 4.
Table 4.
Numerical values for example 4.
We remark that in all examples, the numerical results show the convergence of according to the rate , and according to the rate , and they confirm the theoretical results proven in this paper.
6. Conclusions and Remarks
In this work, we proposed and rigorously analyzed a novel numerical scheme founded on the weak Galerkin mixed finite element method for the approximation of the electrostatic field, formulated from the modified Maxwell equations through the introduction of a Lagrange multiplier. We established the well-posedness of the method and derived optimal convergence rates, which were subsequently validated by numerical experiments. These results are encouraging and suggest that the proposed framework can be successfully generalized to other classes of partial differential equations, including reaction–diffusion and Stokes systems.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, B.S.A. and A.Z.; Methodology, B.S.A. and A.Z.; Software, B.S.A. and A.Z.; Validation, B.S.A. and A.Z.; Formal Analysis, B.S.A. and A.Z.; Writing—Original Draft, A.Z.; Writing—Review and Editing, B.S.A. and A.Z.; Supervision, A.Z. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
The authors extend their appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research at Northern Border University, Arar, KSA for funding this research work through the project number “NBU-FPEJ-2025-2090-01”.
Data Availability Statement
The original contributions presented in this study are included in the article. Further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.
Acknowledgments
The authors extend their appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research at Northern Border University, Arar, KSA for funding this research work through the project number “NBU-FPEJ-2025-2090-01”.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.
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