An ultraweak-local discontinuous Galerkin method for PDEs with high order spatial derivatives

In this paper, we develop a new discontinuous Galerkin method for solving several types of partial differential equations (PDEs) with high order spatial derivatives. We combine the advantages of a local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method and the ultraweak discontinuous Galerkin (UWDG) method. First, we rewrite the PDEs with high order spatial derivatives into a lower order system, then apply the UWDG method to the system. We first consider the fourth order and fifth order nonlinear PDEs in one space dimension, and then extend our method to general high order problems and two space dimensions. The main advantage of our method over the LDG method is that we have introduced fewer auxiliary variables, thereby reducing memory and computational costs. The main advantage of our method over the UWDG method is that no internal penalty terms are necessary in order to ensure stability for both even and odd order PDEs. We prove the stability of our method in the general nonlinear case and provide optimal error estimates for linear PDEs for the solution itself as well as for the auxiliary variables approximating its derivatives. A key ingredient in the proof of the error estimates is the construction of the relationship between the derivative and the element interface jump of the numerical solution and the auxiliary variable solution of the solution derivative. With this relationship, we can then use the discrete Sobolev and Poincaré inequalities to obtain the optimal error estimates. The theoretical findings are confirmed by numerical experiments.