Formulation and analysis of a DPG discretization for a simplified electrochemical model

Abstract

We present a simplified model consisting on two linear elliptic boundary-value problems that represent a single step and single fixed-point iteration in an electrochemical battery model. The main variables are the concentration and the electric potential, whose equation is assigned a Robin BC with a very important physical interpretation. The solvability of both equations is studied in different funcional settings, to finally prove the well-posedness of a broken mixed variational formulation. The latter formulation opens the opportunity of performing discretization and numerical solution via the Discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin (DPG) method, which guarantees discrete stability thanks to optimal test functions. With only the usual assumptions on the data and the discretization, we show that the method herein proposed is convergent. This analytical effort complements other recent works on batttery multiphysics, that have been more modeling and computing oriented, and establishes the DPG approach as a valuable tool to contribute toward an efficient analysis and design of batteries.