An energy conserving spectral scheme for the periodic dynamic elastica

An energy conserving spectral scheme is presented for solving numerically the periodic dynamic elastica. The spatial discretization of the elastica is done on the basis of Galerkin spectral methods with a Chebyshev grid. By comparing numerical solutions with the exact solution, it is verified that the scheme achieves the fourth-order convergence with respect to the grid size. Moreover, an empirical condition is given for the stability of the scheme.