HIGHER ORDER DISCONTINUOUS GALERKIN FINITE ELEMENT METHODS FOR NONLINEAR PARABOLIC PROBLEMS

In this paper, we consider discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods with interior penalty term to approximate the solution of nonlinear parabolic problems with mixed boundary conditions. We construct the finite element spaces of the piecewise polynomials on which we define fully discrete discontinuous Galerkin approximations using the Crank-Nicolson method. To analyze the error estimates, we construct an appropriate projection which allows us to obtain the optimal order of a priori L ∞ (L 2 ) error estimates of discontinuous Galerkin approximations in both spatial and temporal directions.