Stability analysis of high order methods for the wave equation

Abstract In this paper, we investigate the stability of a numerical method for solving the wave equation. The method uses explicit leap-frog in time and high order continuous and discontinuous (DG) finite elements using the standard Lagrange and Hermite basis functions in space. Matrix eigenvalue analysis is used to calculate time-step restrictions. We show that the time-step restriction for continuous Lagrange elements is independent of the nodal distribution, such as equidistributed Lagrange nodes and Gauss–Lobatto nodes. We show that the time-step restriction for the symmetric interior penalty DG schemes with the usual penalty terms is tighter than for continuous Lagrange finite elements. Finally, we conclude that the best time-step restriction is obtained for continuous Hermite finite elements up to polynomial degrees p = 13 .