Adaptive mesh refinements for thin shells whose middle surface is not exactly known

A strategy concerning mesh refinements for thin shells computation is presented. The geometry of the shell is given only by the reduced information consisting in nodes and normals on its middle surface corresponding to a coarse mesh. The new point is that the mesh refinements are defined from several criteria, including the transverse shear forces which do not appear in the mechanical energy of the applied shell formulation. Another important point is to be able to construct the unknown middle surface at each step of the refinement. For this, an interpolation method by edges, coupled with a triangle bisection algorithm, is applied. This strategy is illustrated on various geometries and mechanical problems

An anisotropic mesh adaptation method for the finite element solution of heterogeneous anisotropic diffusion problems

Heterogeneous anisotropic diffusion problems arise in the various areas of science and engineering including plasma physics, petroleum engineering, and image processing. Standard numerical methods can produce spurious oscillations when they are used to solve those problems. A common approach to avoid this difficulty is to design a proper numerical scheme and/or a proper mesh so that the numerical solution validates the discrete counterpart (DMP) of the maximum principle satisfied by the continuous solution. A well known mesh condition for the DMP satisfaction by the linear finite element solution of isotropic diffusion problems is the non-obtuse angle condition that requires the dihedral angles of mesh elements to be non-obtuse. In this paper, a generalization of the condition, the so-called anisotropic non-obtuse angle condition, is developed for the finite element solution of heterogeneous anisotropic diffusion problems. The new condition is essentially the same as the existing one except that the dihedral angles are now measured in a metric depending on the diffusion matrix of the underlying problem. Several variants of the new condition are obtained. Based on one of them, two metric tensors for use in anisotropic mesh generation are developed to account for DMP satisfaction and the combination of DMP satisfaction and mesh adaptivity. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the features of the linear finite element method for anisotropic meshes generated with the metric tensors.Comment: 34 page

A new equilibrated residual method improving accuracy and efficiency of flux-free error estimates

This paper presents a new methodology to compute guaranteed upper bounds for the energy norm of the error in the context of linear finite element approximations of the reaction–diffusion equation. The new approach revisits the ideas in Parés et al. (2009) [6, 4], with the goal of substantially reducing the computational cost of the flux-free method while retaining the good quality of the bounds. The new methodology provides also a technique to compute equilibrated boundary tractions improving the quality of standard equilibration strategies. The zeroth-order equilibration conditions are imposed using an alternative less restrictive form of the first-order equilibration conditions, along with a new efficient minimization criterion. This new equilibration strategy provides much more accurate upper bounds for the energy and requires only doubling the dimension of the local linear systems of equations to be solved.Postprint (author's final draft

Compatible finite element spaces for geophysical fluid dynamics

Compatible finite elements provide a framework for preserving important structures in equations of geophysical uid dynamics, and are becoming important in their use for building atmosphere and ocean models. We survey the application of compatible finite element spaces to geophysical uid dynamics, including the application to the nonlinear rotating shallow water equations, and the three-dimensional compressible Euler equations. We summarise analytic results about dispersion relations and conservation properties, and present new results on approximation properties in three dimensions on the sphere, and on hydrostatic balance properties