Stable multilevel splittings of boundary edge element spaces

We establish the stability of nodal multilevel decompositions of lowest-order conforming boundary element subspaces of the trace space ${\boldsymbol{H}}^{-\frac {1}{2}}(\operatorname {div}_{\varGamma },{\varGamma })$ of ${\boldsymbol{H}}(\operatorname {\bf curl},{\varOmega })$ on boundaries of triangulated Lipschitz polyhedra. The decompositions are based on nested triangular meshes created by uniform refinement and the stability bounds are uniform in the number of refinement levels. The main tool is the general theory of P.Oswald (Interface preconditioners and multilevel extension operators, in Proc. 11th Intern. Conf. on Domain Decomposition Methods, London, 1998, pp.96-103) that teaches, when stability of decompositions of boundary element spaces with respect to trace norms can be inferred from corresponding stability results for finite element spaces. ${\boldsymbol{H}}(\operatorname {\bf curl},{\varOmega })$ -stable discrete extension operators are instrumental in this. Stable multilevel decompositions immediately spawn subspace correction preconditioners whose performance will not degrade on very fine surface meshes. Thus, the results of this article demonstrate how to construct optimal iterative solvers for the linear systems of equations arising from the Galerkin edge element discretization of boundary integral equations for eddy current problem

Space-time adaptive finite elements for nonlocal parabolic variational inequalities

This article considers the error analysis of finite element discretizations and adaptive mesh refinement procedures for nonlocal dynamic contact and friction, both in the domain and on the boundary. For a large class of parabolic variational inequalities associated to the fractional Laplacian we obtain a priori and a posteriori error estimates and study the resulting space-time adaptive mesh-refinement procedures. Particular emphasis is placed on mixed formulations, which include the contact forces as a Lagrange multiplier. Corresponding results are presented for elliptic problems. Our numerical experiments for $2$-dimensional model problems confirm the theoretical results: They indicate the efficiency of the a posteriori error estimates and illustrate the convergence properties of space-time adaptive, as well as uniform and graded discretizations.Comment: 47 pages, 20 figure