A Conservative and Positivity-Preserving Discontinuous Galerkin Method for the Population Balance Equation

Abstract We develop a conservative and positivity-preserving discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for the population balance equation (PBE), which models the distribution of particle numbers across particle sizes due to growth, nucleation, aggregation, and breakage. To ensure number conservation in growth and mass conservation in aggregation and breakage, we design a DG scheme that applies standard treatment for growth and nucleation, and introduces a novel discretization for aggregation and breakage. The birth and death terms are discretized in a symmetric double-integral form, evaluated using a common refinement of the integration domain and carefully selected quadrature rules. Beyond conservation, we focus on preserving the positivity of the number density in aggregation–breakage. Since local mass corresponds to the first moment, the classical Zhang–Shu limiter, which preserves the zeroth moment (i.e., cell average), is not directly applicable. We address this by proving the positivity of the first moment on each cell and constructing a moment-conserving limiter that enforces nonnegativity across the domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to develop a positivity-preserving algorithm that conserves a prescribed moment. The numerical results verify the accuracy, conservation, and robustness of the proposed method.