Vanishing Moment Method and Moment Solutions for Fully Nonlinear Second Order Partial Differential Equations

This paper concerns with numerical approximations of solutions of fully nonlinear second order partial differential equations (PDEs). A new notion of weak solutions, called moment solutions, is introduced for fully nonlinear second order PDEs. Unlike viscosity solutions, moment solutions are defined by a constructive method, called the vanishing moment method, and hence, they can be readily computed by existing numerical methods such as finite difference, finite element, spectral Galerkin, and discontinuous Galerkin methods. The main idea of the proposed vanishing moment method is to approximate a fully nonlinear second order PDE by a higher order, in particular, a quasilinear fourth order PDE. We show by various numerical experiments the viability of the proposed vanishing moment method. All our numerical experiments show the convergence of the vanishing moment method, and they also show that moment solutions coincide with viscosity solutions whenever the latter exist.