A multilevel Newton's method for a two phase mixture model with
nonlinear discontinuous degenerate diffusion coefficient

Guangio Xue
Dept. of Mathematics
Center for Computational Mathematics and Applications
The Pennsylvania State University
xue@math.psu.edu
Jinchao Xu, Chao-Yang Wang, Robert Falgout

The traditional Newton's method requires certain smoothness of the coefficients of partial differential equations to get local convergence. In this paper, a multilevel Newton's method is developed for a two phase model with nonlinear discontinuous degenerate diffusion coefficient arising in fuel cell applications. A major finding is that the discrete algebraic function after using linear finite element method is Lipschitz continuous. Numerical example shows the robustness of this method.