On slope limiting and deep learning techniques for the numerical solution to convection-dominated convection-diffusion problems

Abstract

As the first main topic, several slope-limiting techniques from the literature are presented, and various novel methods are proposed. These post-processing techniques aim to automatically detect regions where the discrete solution has unphysical values and approximate the solution locally by a lower degree polynomial. This thesis's first major contribution is that two novel methods can reduce the spurious oscillations significantly and better than the previously known methods while preserving the mass locally, as seen in two benchmark problems with two different diffusion coefficients.

The second focus is showing how to incorporate techniques from machine learning into the framework of classical finite element methods. Hence, another significant contribution of this thesis is the construction of a machine learning-based slope limiter. It is trained with data from a lower-order DG method from a particular problem and applied to a higher-order DG method for the same and a different problem. It reduces the oscillations significantly compared to the standard DG method but is slightly worse than the classical limiters.

The third main contribution is related to physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to approximate the solution to the model problem. Various ways to incorporate the Dirichlet boundary data, several loss functionals that are novel in the context of PINNs, and variational PINNs are presented for convection-diffusion-reaction problems. They are tested and compared numerically. The novel loss functionals improve the error compared to the vanilla PINN approach. It is observed that the approximations are free of oscillations and can cope with interior layers but have problems capturing boundary layers.