Partially Penalized Immersed Finite Element Methods for Elliptic Interface Problems

This article presents new immersed finite element (IFE) methods for solving the popular second order elliptic interface problems on structured Cartesian meshes even if the involved interfaces have nontrivial geometries. These IFE methods contain extra stabilization terms introduced only at interface edges for penalizing the discontinuity in IFE functions. With the enhanced stability due to the added penalty, not only these IFE methods can be proven to have the optimal convergence rate in the H1-norm provided that the exact solution has sufficient regularity, but also numerical results indicate that their convergence rates in both the H1-norm and the L2-norm do not deteriorate when the mesh becomes finer which is a shortcoming of the classic IFE methods in some situations. Trace inequalities are established for both linear and bilinear IFE functions that are not only critical for the error analysis of these new IFE methods, but also are of a great potential to be useful in error analysis for other IFE methods

Immersed finite element method for interface problems with algebraic multigrid solver

This thesis is to discuss the bilinear and 2D linear immersed finite element (IFE) solutions generated from the algebraic multigrid solver for both stationary and moving interface problems. In contrast to the body-fitting mesh restriction of the traditional finite element methods or finite difference methods for interface problems, a number of numerical methods based on structured meshes independent of the interface have been developed. When these methods are applied to the real world applications, we often need to solve the corresponding large scale linear systems many times, which demands efficient solvers. The algebraic multigrid (AMG) method is a natural choice since it is independent of the geometry, which may be very complicated in interface problems. However, for those methods based on finite difference formulation and a structured mesh independent of the interface, the stiffness matrix of the linear system is usually not symmetric positive-definite, which demands extra efforts to design efficient multigrid methods. On the other hand, the stiffness matrix arising from the IFE methods are naturally symmetric positive-definite. Hence the IFE-AMG algorithm is proposed to solve the linear systems of the bilinear and 2D linear IFE methods for both stationary and moving interface problems after the IFE and multi-grid methods are reviewed respectively. The numerical examples demonstrate the features of the proposed algorithm, including the optimal convergence in both Ł² and semi-H¹ norms of the IFE-AMG solutions, the high efficiency with proper choice of the components and parameters of AMG, the influence of the tolerance and the smoother type of AMG on the convergence of the IFE solutions for the interface problems, and the relationship between the cost and the moving interface location --Abstract, page iii

Immersed finite element methods for 4th order differential equations

We propose three new finite element methods for solving boundary value problems of 4th order differential equations with discontinuous coefficients. Typical differential equations modeling the small transverse displacement of a beam and a thin plate formed by multiple uniform materials are considered. One important feature of these finite element methods is that their meshes can be independent of the interface between different materials. Finite element spaces based on both the conforming and mixed formulations are presented. Numerical examples are given to illustrate capabilities of these methods.Department of Applied Mathematic