Direct Discontinuous Galerkin Method with Interface Correction for the Keller-Segel Chemotaxis Model

Abstract

The Keller-Segel (KS) chemotaxis equation is a widely studied mathematical model for understanding the collective behavior of cells in response to chemical gradients. This paper investigates the direct discontinuous Galerkin method with interface correction (DDGIC) for one-dimensional and two-dimensional KS equations governing the cell density and chemoattractant concentration. We establish error estimates for the proposed scheme under suitable smoothness assumptions of the exact solutions. Numerical experiments are conducted to validate the theoretical results. We explore the impact of different coefficient settings in the numerical fluxes on the error of the DDGIC method on uniform and nonuniform meshes. Our findings reveal that the DDGIC method achieves optimal convergence rates with any admissible coefficients for polynomials of odd degrees, while the accuracy of the cell density is sensitive to the numerical flux coefficient in the chemoattractant concentration for polynomials of even degrees. These results hold regardless of whether the mesh is uniform or nonuniform.