Discontinuous Galerkin approximations in computational mechanics: hybridization, exact geometry and degree adaptivity

Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretizations with exact representation of the geometry and local polynomial degree adaptivity are revisited. Hybridization techniques are employed to reduce the computational cost of DG approximations and devise the hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) method. Exact geometry described by non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS) is integrated into HDG using the framework of the NURBS-enhanced finite element method (NEFEM). Moreover, optimal convergence and superconvergence properties of HDG-Voigt formulation in presence of symmetric second-order tensors are exploited to construct inexpensive error indicators and drive degree adaptive procedures. Applications involving the numerical simulation of problems in electrostatics, linear elasticity and incompressible viscous flows are presented. Moreover, this is done for both high-order HDG approximations and the lowest-order framework of face-centered finite volumes (FCFV).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A Cut Finite Element Method with Boundary Value Correction

In this contribution we develop a cut finite element method with boundary value correction of the type originally proposed by Bramble, Dupont, and Thomee. The cut finite element method is a fictitious domain method with Nitsche type enforcement of Dirichlet conditions together with stabilization of the elements at the boundary which is stable and enjoy optimal order approximation properties. A computational difficulty is, however, the geometric computations related to quadrature on the cut elements which must be accurate enough to achieve higher order approximation. With boundary value correction we may use only a piecewise linear approximation of the boundary, which is very convenient in a cut finite element method, and still obtain optimal order convergence. The boundary value correction is a modified Nitsche formulation involving a Taylor expansion in the normal direction compensating for the approximation of the boundary. Key to the analysis is a consistent stabilization term which enables us to prove stability of the method and a priori error estimates with explicit dependence on the meshsize and distance between the exact and approximate boundary

Fast computations with the harmonic Poincaré-Steklov operators on nested refined meshes

In this paper we develop asymptotically optimal algorithms for fast computations with the discrete harmonic Poincar'e-Steklov operators in presence of nested mesh refinement. For both interior and exterior problems the matrix-vector multiplication for the finite element approximations to the Poincar'e-Steklov operators is shown to have a complexity of the order O(Nreflog3N) where Nref is the number of degrees of freedom on the polygonal boundary under consideration and N = 2-p0 · Nref, p0 ≥ 1, is the dimension of a finest quasi-uniform level. The corresponding memory needs are estimated by O(Nreflog2N). The approach is based on the multilevel interface solver (as in the case of quasi-uniform meshes, see [20]) applied to the Schur complement reduction onto the nested refined interface associated with nonmatching decomposition of a polygon by rectangular substructures

Spectral domain embedding for elliptic PDEs in complex domains

AbstractSpectral methods are a class of methods for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). When the solution of the PDE is analytic, it is known that the spectral solutions converge exponentially as a function of the number of modes used. The basic spectral method works only for regular domains such as rectangles or disks. Domain decomposition methods/spectral element methods extend the applicability of spectral methods to more complex geometries. An alternative is to embed the irregular domain into a regular one. This paper uses the spectral method with domain embedding to solve PDEs on complex geometry. The running time of the new algorithm has the same order as that for the usual spectral collocation method for PDEs on regular geometry. The algorithm is extremely simple and can handle Dirichlet, Neumann boundary conditions as well as nonlinear equations