Paving the way to a $\operatorname{T}$-coercive method for the wave equation

Abstract

In this paper, we take a first step toward introducing a space-time transformation operator $\operatorname{T}$ that establishes $\operatorname{T}$-coercivity for the weak variational formulation of the wave equation in space and time on bounded Lipschitz domains. As a model problem, we study the ordinary differential equation (ODE) $u'' + μu = f$ for $μ>0$, which is linked to the wave equation via a Fourier expansion in space. For its weak formulation, we introduce a transformation operator $\operatorname{T}_μ$ that establishes $\operatorname{T}_μ$-coercivity of the bilinear form yielding an unconditionally stable Galerkin-Bubnov formulation with error estimates independent of $μ$. The novelty of the current approach is the explicit dependence of the transformation on $μ$ which, when extended to the framework of partial differential equations, yields an operator acting in both time and space. We pay particular attention to keeping the trial space as a standard Sobolev space, simplifying the error analysis, while only the test space is modified. The theoretical results are complemented by numerical examples.