Adaptive isogeometric analysis with hierarchical box splines

Isogeometric analysis is a recently developed framework based on finite element analysis, where the simple building blocks in geometry and solution space are replaced by more complex and geometrically-oriented compounds. Box splines are an established tool to model complex geometry, and form an intermediate approach between classical tensor-product B-splines and splines over triangulations. Local refinement can be achieved by considering hierarchically nested sequences of box spline spaces. Since box splines do not offer special elements to impose boundary conditions for the numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs), we discuss a weak treatment of such boundary conditions. Along the domain boundary, an appropriate domain strip is introduced to enforce the boundary conditions in a weak sense. The thickness of the strip is adaptively defined in order to avoid unnecessary computations. Numerical examples show the optimal convergence rate of box splines and their hierarchical variants for the solution of PDEs

Characterization of bivariate hierarchical quartic box splines on a three-directional grid

International audienceWe consider the adaptive refinement of bivariate quartic C 2-smooth box spline spaces on the three-directional (type-I) grid G. The polynomial segments of these box splines belong to a certain subspace of the space of quar-tic polynomials, which will be called the space of special quartics. Given a bounded domain Ω ⊂ R 2 and finite sequence (G ℓ) ℓ=0,...,N of dyadically refined grids, we obtain a hierarchical grid by selecting mutually disjoint cells from all levels such that their union covers the entire domain. Using a suitable selection procedure allows to define a basis spanning the hierarchical box spline space. The paper derives a characterization of this space. Under certain mild assumptions on the hierarchical grid, the hierarchical spline space is shown to contain all C 2-smooth functions whose restrictions to the cells of the hierarchical grid are special quartic polynomials. Thus, in this case we can give an affirmative answer to the completeness questions for the hierarchical box spline basis

Completeness characterization of Type-I box splines

We present a completeness characterization of box splines on three-directional triangulations, also called Type-I box spline spaces, based on edge-contact smoothness properties. For any given Type-I box spline, of specific maximum degree and order of global smoothness, our results allow to identify the local linear subspace of polynomials spanned by the box spline translates. We use the global super-smoothness properties of box splines as well as the additional super-smoothness conditions at edges to characterize the spline space spanned by the box spline translates. Subsequently, we prove the completeness of this space space with respect to the local polynomial space induced by the box spline translates. The completeness property allows the construction of hierarchical spaces spanned by the translates of box splines for any polynomial degree on multilevel Type-I grids. We provide a basis for these hierarchical box spline spaces under explicit geometric conditions of the domain

Sum-factorization techniques in Isogeometric Analysis

The fast assembling of stiffness and mass matrices is a key issue in isogeometric analysis, particularly if the spline degree is increased. We present two algorithms based on the idea of sum factorization, one for matrix assembling and one for matrix-free methods, and study the behavior of their computational complexity in terms of the spline order $p$. Opposed to the standard approach, these algorithms do not apply the idea element-wise, but globally or on macro-elements. If this approach is applied to Gauss quadrature, the computational complexity grows as $p^{d+2}$ instead of $p^{2d+1}$ as previously achieved.Comment: 34 pages, 8 figure

Linear dependence of bivariate Minimal Support and Locally Refined B-splines over LR-meshes

The focus on locally refined spline spaces has grown rapidly in recent years due to the need in Isogeoemtric analysis (IgA) of spline spaces with local adaptivity: a property not offered by the strict regular structure of tensor product B-spline spaces. However, this flexibility sometimes results in collections of B-splines spanning the space that are not linearly independent. In this paper we address the minimal number of B-splines that can form a linear dependence relation for Minimal Support B-splines (MS B-splines) and for Locally Refinable B-splines (LR B-splines) on LR-meshes. We show that the minimal number is six for MS B-splines, and eight for LR B-splines. The risk of linear dependency is consequently significantly higher for MS B-splines than for LR B-splines. Further results are established to help detecting collections of B-splines that are linearly independent

A sparse-grid isogeometric solver

Isogeometric Analysis (IGA) typically adopts tensor-product splines and NURBS as a basis for the approximation of the solution of PDEs. In this work, we investigate to which extent IGA solvers can benefit from the so-called sparse-grids construction in its combination technique form, which was first introduced in the early 90s in the context of the approximation of high-dimensional PDEs. The tests that we report show that, in accordance to the literature, a sparse-grid construction can indeed be useful if the solution of the PDE at hand is sufficiently smooth. Sparse grids can also be useful in the case of non-smooth solutions when some a-priori knowledge on the location of the singularities of the solution can be exploited to devise suitable non-equispaced meshes. Finally, we remark that sparse grids can be seen as a simple way to parallelize pre-existing serial IGA solvers in a straightforward fashion, which can be beneficial in many practical situations.Comment: updated version after revie