Lyapunov Stability and Optimal Error Estimates for an SIPG Method for Weakly Damped Semilinear Wave Equations

Abstract

We develop and analyze a fully discrete scheme for the weakly damped semilinear wave equation that combines a Symmetric Interior Penalty Discontinuous Galerkin (SIPG) spatial discretization with a hybrid Crank--Nicolson/second-order Backward Differentiation Formula (CN--BDF2) time integrator. A chord-slope linearization of the nonlinear reaction term is employed, which preserves an exact discrete gradient structure and, crucially, requires {no global Lipschitz continuity assumption} on the nonlinearity. Stability of the fully discrete solution is established through a Lyapunov-based analysis-rather than spectral arguments-by constructing a discrete Lyapunov functional that yields existence, uniqueness, and uniform boundedness of the numerical solution. Under standard regularity assumptions, optimal a~priori error estimates of order $\mathcal{O}(h^{k}+τ^{2})$ in the DG energy norm and $\mathcal{O}(h^{k+1}+τ^{2})$ in the $L^{2}$-norm are proved, where $h$ is the mesh size, $τ$ the time step, and $k$ the polynomial degree. Numerical experiments on two-dimensional problems with linear, cubic, and trigonometric nonlinearities confirm the theoretical convergence rates and illustrate the long-time energy-dissipation properties guaranteed by the Lyapunov structure.