Applications of the Newton-Raphson method in a SDFEM for inviscid Burgers equation

In this paper we investigate in detail the applications of the classical Newton-Raphson method in connection with a space-time finite element discretization scheme for the inviscid Burgers equation in one dimensional space. The underlying discretization method is the so-called streamline diffusion method, which combines good stability properties with high accuracy. The coupled nonlinear algebraic equations thus obtained in each space-time slab are solved by the generalized Newton-Raphson method. Exploiting the band-structured properties of the Jacobian matrix, two different algorithms based on the Newton-Raphson linearization are proposed. In a series of examples, we show that in each time-step a quadratic convergence order is attained when the Newton-Raphson procedure applied to the corresponding system of nonlinear equations.