We consider the approximation properties of finite element spaces on quadrilateral meshes. The finite element spaces are constructed starting with a given finite dimensional space of functions on a square reference element, which is then transformed to a space of functions on each convex quadrilateral element via a bilinear isomorphism of the square onto the element. It is known that for affine isomorphisms, a necessary and sufficient condition for approximation of order r+1 in L2 and order r in H1 is that the given space of functions on the reference element contain all polynomial functions of total degree at most r. In the case of bilinear isomorphisms, it is known that the same estimates hold if the function space contains all polynomial functions of separate degree r. We show, by means of a counterexample, that this latter condition is also necessary. As applications we demonstrate degradation of the convergence order on quadrilateral meshes as compared to rectangular meshes for serendipity finite elements and for various mixed and nonconforming finite elements.
In this paper, we propose an $H(\text{curl}^2)$-conforming quadrilateral spectral element method to solve quad-curl problems. Starting with generalized Jacobi polynomials, we first introduce quasi-orthogonal polynomial systems for vector fields over rectangles. $H(\text{curl}^2)$-conforming elements over arbitrary convex quadrilaterals are then constructed explicitly in a hierarchical pattern using the contravariant transform together with the bilinear mapping from the reference square onto each quadrilateral. It is astonishing that both the simplest rectangular and quadrilateral spectral elem…
We present a novel family of $C^1$ quadrilateral finite elements, which define global $C^1$ spaces over a general quadrilateral mesh with vertices of arbitrary valency. The elements extend the construction by (Brenner and Sung, J. Sci. Comput., 2005), which is based on polynomial elements of tensor-product degree $p\geq 6$, to all degrees $p \geq 3$. Thus, we call the family of $C^1$ finite elements Brenner-Sung quadrilaterals. The proposed $C^1$ quadrilateral can be seen as a special case of the Argyris isogeometric element of (Kapl, Sangalli and Takacs, CAGD, 2019). The quadrilateral element…
The aim of this paper is to show that, for any $p \in [1,\infty)$, the $W^{1,p}$-anisotropic interpolation error estimate holds on quadrilateral isoparametric elements verifying the maximum angle condition ($MAC$) and the property of comparable lengths for opposite sides ($clos$), i.e., on all those quadrilaterals with interior angles uniformly bounded away from $π$ and with both pairs of opposite sides having comparable lengths. For rectangular elements our interpolation error estimate agrees with the usual one whereas for perturbations of rectangles (the most general quadrilateral elements p…
This paper is devoted to the construction of finite elements on grids that consist of general quadrilaterals not limited in parallelograms. Two finite elements defined as Ciarlet's triple are established for the $H^1$ and $H(\rm rot)$ elliptic problems, respectively. An $\mathcal{O}(h)$ order convergence rate in energy norm for both of them and an $\mathcal{O}(h^2)$ order convergence in $L^2$ norm for the $H^1$ scheme are proved under the asymptotic-parallelogram assumption on the grids. Further, the two finite element spaces on general quadrilateral grids, together with the space of piecewise…
A mixed finite element method for nearly incompressible elasticity and Stokes equations using primal and dual meshes with quadrilateral and hexahedral grids
Standard low-order finite elements, which perform well for problems involving compressible elastic materials, are known to under-perform when nearly incompressible materials are involved, commonly exhibiting the locking phenomenon. Interior penalty (IP) discontinuous Galerkin methods have been shown to circumvent locking when simplicial elements are used. The same IP methods, however, result in locking on meshes of quadrilaterals. The authors have shown in earlier work that under-integration of specified terms in the IP formulation eliminates the locking problem for rectangular elements. Here …
We introduce simple quadrature rules for the family of nonparametric nonconforming quadrilateral element with four degrees of freedom. Our quadrature rules are motivated by the work of Meng {\it et al.} \cite{meng2018new}. First, we introduce a family of MVP (Mean Value Property)-preserving four DOFs nonconforming elements on the intermediate reference domain introduced by Meng {\it et al.}. Then we design two--points and three--points quadrature rules on the intermediate reference domain. Under the assumption on equal quadrature weights, the deviation from the quadrilateral center of the Gaus…
A new multiresolution quadrilateral plate element is proposed and a multiresolution finite element method is hence presented. The multiresolution analysis (MRA) framework is formulated out of a mutually nesting displacement subspace sequence, whose basis functions are constructed of scaling and shifting on the element domain of basic node shape function. The basic node shape function is constructed by extending shape function around a specific node. The MRA endows the proposed element with the resolution level (RL) to adjust the element node number, thus modulating structural analysis accuracy…
A homogenization approach is one of effective strategies to solve multiscale elliptic problems approximately. The finite element heterogeneous multiscale method (FEHMM) which is based on the finite element makes possible to simulate such process numerically. In this paper we introduce a FEHMM scheme for multiscale elliptic problems based on nonconforming spaces. In particular we use the noconforming element with the periodic boundary condition introduced in the companion paper. Theoretical analysis derives a priori error estimates in the standard Sobolev norms. Several numerical results which …
Analysis of hybrid methods of mixed-shear-projected triangular and quadrilateral elements for Reissner-Mindlin plates
School of Mathematics, Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学数学学院）；School of Mathematics, Sichuan University（四川大学数学学院）；Experiment Center, China West Normal University（西华师范大学实验中心）
The $L^2$-orthogonal projection $Π_h:L^2(Ω)\rightarrow\mathbb{V}_h$ onto a finite element (FE) space $\mathbb{V}_h$ is called $H^1$-stable iff $\|\nablaΠ_h u\|_{L^2(Ω)}\leq C\|u\|_{H^1(Ω)}$, for any $u\in H^1(Ω)$ with a positive constant $C\neq C(h)$ independent of the mesh size $h>0$. In this work, we discuss local criteria for the $H^1$-stability of adaptively refined meshes. We show that adaptive refinement strategies for quadrilateral meshes in 2D (Q-RG and Q-RB), introduced originally in Bank et al. 1982 and Kobbelt 1996, are $H^1$-stable for FE spaces of polynomial degree $p=2,\ldots,9$.
The $P_1$--nonconforming quadrilateral finite element space with periodic boundary condition is investigated. The dimension and basis for the space are characterized with the concept of minimally essential discrete boundary conditions. We show that the situation is totally different based on the parity of the number of discretization on coordinates. Based on the analysis on the space, we propose several numerical schemes for elliptic problems with periodic boundary condition. Some of these numerical schemes are related with solving a linear equation consisting of a non-invertible matrix. By co…
In this paper we introduce a $C^1$ spline space over mixed meshes composed of triangles and quadrilaterals, suitable for FEM-based or isogeometric analysis. In this context, a mesh is considered to be a partition of a planar polygonal domain into triangles and/or quadrilaterals. The proposed space combines the Argyris triangle, cf. (Argyris, Fried, Scharpf; 1968), with the $C^1$ quadrilateral element introduced in (Brenner, Sung; 2005) and (Kapl, Sangalli, Takacs; 2019) for polynomial degrees $p\geq 5$. The space is assumed to be $C^2$ at all vertices and $C^1$ across edges, and the splines ar…
An extended range of energy stable flux reconstruction schemes, developed using a summation-by-parts approach, is presented on quadrilateral elements for various sets of polynomial bases. For the maximal order bases, a new set of correction functions which result in stable schemes is found. However, for a range of orders it is shown that only a single correction function can be cast as a tensor-product. Subsequently, correction functions are identified using a generalised analytic framework that results in stable schemes for total order and approximate Euclidean order polynomial bases on quadr…
We develop a multipoint stress mixed finite element method for linear elasticity with weak stress symmetry on quadrilateral grids, which can be reduced to a symmetric and positive definite cell centered system. The method is developed on simplicial grids in [4]. The method utilizes the lowest order Brezzi-Douglas-Marini finite element spaces for the stress and the trapezoidal quadrature rule in order to localize the interaction of degrees of freedom, which allows for local stress elimination around each vertex. We develop two variants of the method. The first uses a piecewise constant rotation…
We describe an adaptive version of a method for generating valid naturally curved quadrilateral meshes. The method uses a guiding field, derived from the concept of a cross field, to create block decompositions of multiply connected two dimensional domains. The a priori curved quadrilateral blocks can be further split into a finer high-order mesh as needed. The guiding field is computed by a Laplace equation solver using a continuous Galerkin or discontinuous Galerkin spectral element formulation. This operation is aided by using $p$-adaptation to achieve faster convergence of the solution wit…
Smooth Bezier Surfaces over Arbitrary Quadrilateral Meshes
The Rachel and Selim Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering（Rachel和Selim Benin计算机科学与工程学）；Hebrew University of Jerusalem（耶路撒冷希伯来大学）；Microsoft Corp.（微软公司）
We describe a high order technique to generate quadrilateral decompositions and meshes for complex two dimensional domains using spectral elements in a field guided procedure. Inspired by cross field methods, we never actually compute crosses. Instead, we compute a high order accurate guiding field using a continuous Galerkin (CG) or discontinuous Galerkin (DG) spectral element method to solve a Laplace equation for each of the field variables using the open source code Nektar++. The spectral method provides spectral convergence and sub-element resolution of the fields. The DG approximation al…
Within finite element models of fluids, vector-valued fields such as velocity or momentum variables are commonly discretised using the Raviart-Thomas elements. However, when using the lowest-order quadrilateral Raviart-Thomas elements, standard finite element discretisations of the vector transport equation typically have a low order of spatial accuracy. This paper describes two schemes that improve the accuracy of transporting such vector-valued fields on two-dimensional curved manifolds. The first scheme that is presented reconstructs the transported field in a higher-order function space, w…
We present a novel approach for high-order accurate numerical differentiation on unstructured meshes of quadrilateral elements. To differentiate a given function, an auxiliary function with greater smoothness properties is defined which when differentiated provides the derivatives of the original function. The method generalises traditional finite difference methods to meshes of arbitrary topology in any number of dimensions for any order of derivative and accuracy. We demonstrate the accuracy of the numerical scheme using dual quadrilateral meshes and a refinement method based on subdivision …
Given a sequence of finite element spaces which form a de Rham sequence, we will construct a dual representation of these spaces with associated differential operators which connect these spaces such that they also form a de Rham sequence. The matrix which converts primal representations to dual representations -- the Hodge matrix -- is the mass or Gram matrix. It will be shown that a bilinear form of a primal and a dual representation is equal to the vector inner product of the expansion coefficients (degrees of freedom) of both representations. This leads to very sparse system matrices, even…
High-order entropy-stable discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for nonlinear conservation laws reproduce a discrete entropy inequality by combining entropy conservative finite volume fluxes with summation-by-parts (SBP) discretization matrices. In the DG context, on tensor product (quadrilateral and hexahedral) elements, SBP matrices are typically constructed by collocating at Lobatto quadrature points. Recent work has extended the construction of entropy-stable DG schemes to collocation at more accurate Gauss quadrature points. In this work, we extend entropy-stable Gauss collocation schemes t…
Isogeometric Analysis generalizes classical finite element analysis and intends to integrate it with the field of Computer-Aided Design. A central problem in achieving this objective is the reconstruction of analysis-suitable models from Computer-Aided Design models, which is in general a non-trivial and time-consuming task. In this article, we present a novel spline construction, that enables model reconstruction as well as simulation of high-order PDEs on the reconstructed models. The proposed almost-$C^1$ are biquadratic splines on fully unstructured quadrilateral meshes (without restrictio…
Easy to construct and optimally convergent generalisations of B-splines to unstructured meshes are essential for the application of isogeometric analysis to domains with non-trivial topologies. Nonetheless, especially for hexahedral meshes, the construction of smooth and optimally convergent isogeometric analysis basis functions is still an open question. We introduce a simple partition of unity construction that yields smooth blended B-splines, referred to as SB-splines, on semi-structured quadrilateral and hexahedral meshes, namely on mostly structured meshes with a few sufficiently separate…
If a finite element mesh contains concave elements, it is said to tangled. Tangled meshes can occur during mesh generation, mesh optimization, and large deformation simulations, and will lead to erroneous results during finite element analysis. Recently, the authors introduced the tangled finite element method (TFEM) to accurately handle tangled 2D concave quadrilateral elements. In this paper, TFEM is extended to 3D hexahedral elements. We demonstrate that TFEM leads to accurate results over tangled hexahedral elements, requiring minimal changes to existing FEM framework.
