65Nxx Partial differential equations, boundary value problems
A new finite element method computes conductivity in some unstructured particle-reinforced composite material. The 2-phase material under consideration is composed of a poorly conducting matrix material filled by highly conducting circular inclusions which are randomly dispersed. The mathematical model is a Poisson-type problem with discontinuous coefficients. The discontinuities are huge in contrast and quantity.
The proposed method generalizes classical continuous piecewise affine finite elements to special computational meshes which encode the particles in a network structure. Important geometric parameters such as the volume fraction are preserved exactly.
The computational complexity of the resulting method is proportional to the number of inclusions and this is optimal in comparison to data complexity.
The discretization error is proportional to the particle distance and does not depend on the conductivity contrast in the medium.
This note constructs a local generalized finite element basis for elliptic problems with heterogeneous and highly varying diffusion tensor. The basis functions are solutions of local problems on vertex patches. The error of the corresponding generalized finite element method decays exponentially w.r.t. the number of element layers in the patches. Hence, on a uniform mesh of size H, patches of diameter log(1/H) are sufficient to preserve the convergence rates of the classical P1-FEM for the Poisson problem.
The analysis does not rely on regularity of the solution or scale separation in the coefficient.
The result justifies the use of the class of variational multiscale methods, introduced in [Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg., 196:2313--2324, 2007].
We investigate geodesic finite elements for functions with values in a space of zero curvature, like a torus or the M\"obius strip. Unlike in the general case, a closed-form expression for geodesic finite element functions is then available. This simplifies computations, and allows us to prove optimal estimates for the interpolation error in 1d and 2d. We also show the somewhat surprising result that the discretization by Kirchhoff transformation of the Richards equation proposed by Berninger et al. is a discretization by geodesic finite elements in the manifold $\mathbb{R}$ with a special metric.
We introduce functional perturbation results for PDE eigenvalue problems including the functional backward error
and the functional condition number. These results are used to establish a combined a posteriori error estimator embodying the discretization and the approximation error for the simple eigenpair.
Based on known perturbation results in $H^{1}(\Omega)$ and $H^{-1}(\Omega)$ norms and a standard residual a posteriori error estimator, a balancing AFEM algorithm is proposed. The stopping criterion for the eigensolver is based on the equilibrating strategy, i.e., iterations proceed as long as the discrete part of the error estimator dominates the continuous part. All our statements are illustrated with several numerical examples.