Removing the cell resonance error in the multiscale finite element method via a Petrov-Galerkin formulation

We continue the study of the nonconforming multiscale finite element method (Ms- FEM) introduced in 17, 14 for second order elliptic equations with highly oscillatory coefficients. The main difficulty in MsFEM, as well as other numerical upscaling methods, is the scale resonance effect. It has been show that the leading order resonance error can be effectively removed by using an over-sampling technique. Nonetheless, there is still a secondary cell resonance error of O(Є^2/h^2). Here, we introduce a Petrov-Galerkin MsFEM formulation with nonconforming multiscale trial functions and linear test functions. We show that the cell resonance error is eliminated in this formulation and hence the convergence rate is greatly improved. Moreover, we show that a similar formulation can be used to enhance the convergence of an immersed-interface finite element method for elliptic interface problems

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