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Publications [#244214] of Thomas P. Witelski
search www.ams.org.Papers Published
- Witelski, TP; Schaeffer, DG; Shearer, M, A discrete model for an ill-posed nonlinear parabolic PDE,
Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, vol. 160 no. 3-4
(December, 2001),
pp. 189-221, Elsevier BV, ISSN 0167-2789 [S0167-2789(01)00350-5], [doi]
(last updated on 2024/04/17)
Abstract: We study a finite-difference discretization of an ill-posed nonlinear parabolic partial differential equation. The PDE is the one-dimensional version of a simplified two-dimensional model for the formation of shear bands via anti-plane shear of a granular medium. For the discretized initial value problem, we derive analytically, and observed numerically, a two-stage evolution leading to a steady-state: (i) an initial growth of grid-scale instabilities, and (ii) coarsening dynamics. Elaborating the second phase, at any fixed time the solution has a piecewise linear profile with a finite number of shear bands. In this coarsening phase, one shear band after another collapses until a steady-state with just one jump discontinuity is achieved. The amplitude of this steady-state shear band is derived analytically, but due to the ill-posedness of the underlying problem, its position exhibits sensitive dependence. Analyzing data from the simulations, we observe that the number of shear bands at time t decays like t-1/3. From this scaling law, we show that the time-scale of the coarsening phase in the evolution of this model for granular media critically depends on the discreteness of the model. Our analysis also has implications to related ill-posed nonlinear PDEs for the one-dimensional Perona-Malik equation in image processing and to models for clustering instabilities in granular materials. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
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