Dislocation transport using an explicit Galerkin/least-squares formulation

An explicit Galerkin/least-squares formulation is introduced for a quasilinear transport equation in field dislocation mechanics (FDM) and applied to the study of the kinematics of dislocation density evolution in the following physical contexts: annihilation of dislocations, expansion of a polygonal dislocation loop and simulation of a Frank-Read source. Stability analysis is carried out for the corresponding linear one-dimensional (1D) case. The formulation reduces to the Lax-Wendroff finite difference scheme for the 1D equation when equal weighting is used for the Galerkin and least-squares terms and the shape functions are linear. This conditionally stable method leads to a symmetric well-conditioned system of equations with constant coefficients, making it attractive for large-scale problems. It is shown that the transport equation, in the contexts mentioned above simplifies to the Hamilton-Jacobi equations governing geometrical optics and level-set methods. The weak solutions to these equations are not unique, and the numerical method is able to capture solutions corresponding to shock as well as rarefraction waves by appropriate algorithmic modifications.