Relaxing the CFL condition for the wave equation on adaptive meshes

Abstract

The Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) condition guarantees the stability of the popular explicit leapfrog method for the wave equation. However, it limits the choice of the time step size to be bounded by the minimal mesh size in the spatial finite element mesh. This essentially prohibits any sort of adaptive mesh refinement that would be required to reveal optimal convergence rates on domains with re-entrant corners. This paper shows how a simple subspace projection step inspired by numerical homogenisation can remove the critical time step restriction so that the CFL condition and approximation properties are balanced in an optimal way, even in the presence of spatial singularities.