This paper is concerned with the stability issue in determining absorption and diffusion coefficients in photoacoustic imaging. Assuming that the medium is layered and the acoustic wave speed is known, we derive global Hölder stability estimates of the photoacoustic inversion. These results show that the reconstruction is stable in the region close to the optical illumination source, and deteriorate exponentially far away. Several experimental pointed out that the resolution depth of the photoacoustic modality is about tens of millimeters. Our stability estimates confirm these observations and give a rigorous quantification of this depth resolution.

We construct a nonlinear monotone finite volume scheme for three-dimensional diffusion equation on tetrahedral meshes. Since it is crucial important to eliminate the vertex unknowns in the construction of the scheme, we present a new efficient eliminating method. The scheme has only cell-centered unknowns and can deal with discontinuous or tensor diffusion coefficient problems on distorted meshes rigorously. The numerical results illustrate that the resulting scheme can preserve positivity on distorted tetrahedral meshes, and also show that our scheme appears to be approximate second-order accuracy for solution.

A consistent description of the hydrogen permeation through metal membrane based on hydrogen chemical potential proposed has been explained in detail. The hydrogen flux is proportional to the PCT factor, f PCT, consistently, which reflects the shape of the pressure-composition-isotherm (PCT curve) of the material. In addition, in view of the PCT factor, f PCT, and the ductile-to-brittle transition hydrogen concentration, DBTC, a concept for alloy design with high hydrogen permeability and strong resistance to hydrogen embrittlement has been proposed. In this concept, it is important to design alloy composition with appropriate PCT curve under the given pressure and temperature condition. As an example, V–9 mol% Al alloy has been designed, which exhibits high hydrogen flux without brittle fracture under given condition. Thus, the new consistent description is useful not only for the understanding of the hydrogen permeation property but also for the alloy design.

The extension of diamond scheme for diffusion equation to three dimensions is presented. The discrete normal flux is constructed by a linear combination of the directional flux along the line connecting cell-centers and the tangent flux along the cell-faces. In addition, it treats material discontinuities by a new iterative method. The stability and first-order convergence of the method is proved on distorted meshes. The numerical results illustrate that the method appears to be approximate second-order accuracy for solution.

Many physical processes appear to exhibit fractional order behavior that may vary with time or space. The continuum of order in the fractional calculus allows the order of the fractional operator to be considered as a variable. Numerical methods and analysis of stability and convergence of numerical scheme for the variable fractional order partial differential equations are quite limited and difficult to derive. This motivates us to develop efficient numerical methods as well as stability and convergence of the implicit numerical methods for the space-time variable fractional order diffusion equation on a finite domain. It is worth mentioning that here we use the Coimbra-definition variable time fractional derivative which is more efficient from the numerical standpoint and is preferable for modeling dynamical systems. An implicit Euler approximation is proposed and then the stability and convergence of the numerical scheme are investigated. Finally, numerical examples are provided to show that the implicit Euler approximation is computationally efficient.

In this paper, we explore the use of the diffusion geometry framework for the fusion of geometric and photometric information in local and global shape descriptors. Our construction is based on the definition of a diffusion process on the shape manifold embedded into a high-dimensional space where the embedding coordinates represent the photometric information. Experimental results show that such data fusion is useful in coping with different challenges of shape analysis where pure geometric and pure photometric methods fail.

As the generalization of the integer order partial differential equations (PDE), the fractional order PDEs are drawing more and more attention for their applications in fluid flow, finance and other areas. This paper presents high-order accurate Runge-Kutta local discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for one- and two-dimensional fractional diffusion equations containing derivatives of fractional order in space. The Caputo derivative is chosen as the representation of spatial derivative, because it may represent the fractional derivative by an integral operator. Some numerical examples show that the convergence orders of the proposed local Pk-DG methods are O(hk+1) both in one and two dimensions, where Pk denotes the space of the real-valued polynomials with degree at most k.

In this paper we present two versions of the central localdiscontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method on overlapping cellsfor solving diffusion equations, and provide theirstability analysis and error estimates for the linear heat equation.A comparisonbetween the traditional LDG method ona single mesh and the two versions of the central LDGmethod on overlapping cells is also made.Numerical experiments are provided to validate the quantitativeconclusions from the analysis and to support conclusions forgeneral polynomial degrees.

We developed a mimetic finite difference method for solving elliptic equations with tensor coefficients on polyhedral meshes. The first-order convergence estimates in a mesh-dependent H1 norm are derived.

In this paper, we extend the reduced-basis methods and associated a posteriori error estimators developed earlier for elliptic partial differential equations to parabolic problems with affine parameter dependence. The essential new ingredient is the presence of time in the formulation and solution of the problem – we shall “simply” treat time as an additional, albeit special, parameter. First, we introduce the reduced-basis recipe – Galerkin projection onto a space WN spanned by solutions of the governing partial differential equation at N selected points in parameter-time space – and develop a new greedy adaptive procedure to “optimally” construct the parameter-time sample set. Second, we propose error estimation and adjoint procedures that provide rigorous and sharp bounds for the error in specific outputs of interest: the estimates serve a priori to construct our samples, and a posteriori to confirm fidelity. Third, based on the assumption of affine parameter dependence, we develop offline-online computational procedures: in the offline stage, we generate the reduced-basis space; in the online stage, given a new parameter value, we calculate the reduced-basis output and associated error bound. The operation count for the online stage depends only on N (typically small) and the parametric complexity of the problem; the method is thus ideally suited for repeated, rapid, reliable evaluation of input-output relationships in the many-query or real-time contexts.

We develop a new, self-contained proof that the expected number of generations required for gene allele fixation or extinction in a population of size n is O(n) under general assumptions. The proof relies on a discrete Markov chain analysis. We further develop an algorithm to compute expected fixation or extinction time to any desired precision. Our proofs establish O(nH(p)) as the expected time for gene allele fixation or extinction for the Fisher-Wright problem, where the gene occurs with initial frequency p and H(p) is the entropy function. Under a weaker hypothesis on the variance, the expected time is O(n(p(1-p))1/2) for fixation or extinction. Thus, the expected-time bound of O(n) for fixation or extinction holds in a wide range of situations. In the multi-allele case, the expected time for allele fixation or extinction in a population of size n with n distinct alleles is shown to be O(n). From this, a new proof is given of a coalescence theorem about the mean time to the most recent common ancestor (MRCA), which applies to a broad range of reproduction models satisfying our mean and weak variation conditions.