We consider a system of second-order nonlinear elliptic partial differential equations that models the equilibrium configurations of a two-dimensional planar bistable nematic liquid crystal device. Discontinuous Galerkin (dG) finite element methods are used to approximate the solutions of this nonlinear problem with nonhomogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. A discrete inf–sup condition demonstrates the stability of the dG discretization of a well-posed linear problem. We then establish the existence and local uniqueness of the discrete solution of the nonlinear problem. A priori error estimates in the energy and $\mathbf{L}^2$ norms are derived and a best approximation property is demonstrated. Further, we prove the quadratic convergence of the Newton iterates along with complementary numerical experiments.

We study a system of semi-linear elliptic partial differential equations with a lower order cubic nonlinear term, and inhomogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions, relevant for two-dimensional bistable liquid crystal devices, within a reduced Landau–de Gennes framework. The main results are (i) a priori error estimates for the energy norm, within the Nitsche’s and discontinuous Galerkin frameworks under milder regularity assumptions on the exact solution and (ii) a reliable and efficient a posteriori analysis for a sufficiently large penalization parameter and a sufficiently fine triangulation in both cases. Numerical examples that validate the theoretical results, are presented separately.

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This paper focuses on the analysis of a free energy functional, that models a dilute suspension of magnetic nanoparticles in a two-dimensional nematic well. The first part of the article is devoted to the asymptotic analysis of global energy minimizers in the limit of vanishing elastic constant, ℓ → 0 where the re-scaled elastic constant ℓ is inversely proportional to the domain area. The first results concern the strong 𝐻 1convergence and a ℓ-independent 𝐻 2 -bound for the global minimizers on smooth bounded 2D domains, with smooth boundary and topologically trivial Dirichlet conditions. The second part focuses on the discrete approximation of regular solutions of the corresponding non-linear system of partial differential equations with cubic non-linearity and non-homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. We establish (i) the existence and local uniqueness of the discrete solutions using fixed point argument, (ii) a best approximation result in energy norm, (iii) error estimates in the energy and 𝐿 2 norms with ℓ-discretization parameter dependency for the conforming finite element method. Finally, the theoretical results are complemented by numerical experiments on the discrete solution profiles, the numerical convergence rates that corroborates the theoretical estimates, followed by plots that illustrate the dependence of the discretization parameter on ℓ.

We consider a system of second order non-linear elliptic partial differential equations that models the equilibrium configurations of a two dimensional planar bistable nematic liquid crystal device. Discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods are used to approximate the solutions of this nonlinear problem with non-homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. A discrete inf-sup condition demonstrates the stability of the discontinuous Galerkin discretization of a well-posed linear problem. We then establish the existence and local uniqueness of the discrete solution of the non-linear problem. An a priori error estimate in the energy norm is derived and a best approximation property is demonstrated. Further, we prove the quadratic convergence of Newton's iterates along with complementary numerical experiments.