Mimetic finite difference methods for Hamiltonian wave equations in 2D

In this paper we consider the numerical solution of the Hamiltonian wave equation in two spatial dimensions. We construct a two step procedure in which we first discretize the space by the Mimetic Finite Difference (MFD) method and then we employ a standard symplectic scheme to integrate the semi-discrete Hamiltonian system derived. The main characteristic of the MFD methods, when applied to stationary problems, is to mimic important properties of the continuous system. This approach yields a full numerical procedure suitable to integrate Hamiltonian problems. A complete theoretical analysis of the method and some numerical simulations are developed in the paper.