Convergence Rates in L^2 for Elliptic Homogenization Problems

We study rates of convergence of solutions in L^2 and H^{1/2} for a family of elliptic systems {L_\epsilon} with rapidly oscillating oscillating coefficients in Lipschitz domains with Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions. As a consequence, we obtain convergence rates for Dirichlet, Neumann, and Steklov eigenvalues of {L_\epsilon}. Most of our results, which rely on the recently established uniform estimates for the L^2 Dirichlet and Neumann problems in \cite{12,13}, are new even for smooth domains.Comment: 25 page

Convergence of a nonconforming multiscale finite element method

The multiscale finite element method (MsFEM) [T. Y. Hou, X. H. Wu, and Z. Cai, Math. Comp., 1998, to appear; T. Y. Hou and X. H. Wu, J. Comput. Phys., 134 (1997), pp. 169-189] has been introduced to capture the large scale solutions of elliptic equations with highly oscillatory coefficients. This is accomplished by constructing the multiscale base functions from the local solutions of the elliptic operator. Our previous study reveals that the leading order error in this approach is caused by the "resonant sampling," which leads to large error when the mesh size is close to the small scale of the continuous problem. Similar difficulty also arises in numerical upscaling methods. An oversampling technique has been introduced to alleviate this difficulty [T. Y. Hou and X. H. Wu, J. Comput. Phys., 134 (1997), pp. 169-189]. A consequence of the oversampling method is that the resulting finite element method is no longer conforming. Here we give a detailed analysis of the nonconforming error. Our analysis also reveals a new cell resonance error which is caused by the mismatch between the mesh size and the wavelength of the small scale. We show that the cell resonance error is of lower order. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the cell resonance error is generically small and is difficult to observe in practice