PNNL

Abstract

In this work, we propose a novel two-level discretization for solving semilinear elliptic equations with random coefficients. Motivated by the two-grid method for deterministic partial differential equations (PDEs) introduced by Xu, our two-level stochastic collocation method utilizes a two-grid finite element discretization in the physical space and a two-level collocation method in the random domain. In particular, we solve semilinear equations on a coarse mesh $\mathcal{T}_H$ with a low level stochastic collocation (corresponding to the polynomial space $\mathcal{P}_{P}$) and solve linearized equations on a fine mesh $\mathcal{T}_h$ using high level stochastic collocation (corresponding to the polynomial space $\mathcal{P}_p$). We prove that the approximated solution obtained from this method achieves the same order of accuracy as that from solving the original semilinear problem directly by stochastic collocation method with $\mathcal{T}_h$ and $\mathcal{P}_p$. The two-level method is computationally more efficient, especially for nonlinear problems with high random dimensions. Numerical experiments are also provided to verify the theoretical results.