Collocation Methods for Hyperbolic Partial Differential Equations with Singular Sources

A numerical study is given on the spectral methods and the high order WENO finite difference scheme for the solution of linear and nonlinear hyperbolic partial differential equations with stationary and non-stationary singular sources. The singular source term is represented by the delta-function. For the approximation of the delta-function, the direct projection method is used that was proposed in [6]. The delta-function is constructed in a consistent way to the derivative operator. Nonlinear sine-Gordon equation with a stationary singular source was solved with the Chebyshev collocation method. The delta-function with the spectral method is highly oscillatory but yields good results with small number of collocation points. The results are compared with those computed by the second order finite difference method. In modeling general hyperbolic equations with a non-stationary singular source, however, the solution of the linear scalar wave equation with the nonstationary singular source using the direct projection method yields non-physical oscillations for both the spectral method and the WENO scheme. The numerical artifacts arising when the non-stationary singular source term is considered on the discrete grids are explained.