Extrapolation techniques for reducing the pollution effect of reentrant corners in the finite element method (Q1106002): Difference between revisions

Finite element solutions of boundary value problems with reentrant corners suffer from global loss of accuracy caused by the influence of singularities. A sufficiently simple extrapolation technique is suggested in order to subpress this effect, for application of which an a priori knowledge of the asymptotic growth of the singularities is required. One of the main results is an asymptotic representation of the error \[ (1)\quad (u-u_ n)(x)=\sum^{N}_{n=1}A_ nK_{n;1}(u)S'_{n;- 1}(x)h_ n^{2\alpha_{n;1}}+O(h^ 2| \log h|), \] where N is the number of reentrant corners, \(h_ n\) are the local mesh size parameters, \(K_{n;1}\) and \(S'_{n;-1}\) are the corresponding leading stress intensity factors and ``dual'' singular functions. This representation holds on certain locally uniform meshes. On the basis of (1) an extrapolation procedure is proposed for eliminating the N dominant error terms yielding approximations \(\tilde u_ n\) and \(K_{n;1}(\tilde u_ n)\) which are of almost optimal order \((u-\tilde u_ n)(x)=O(h^ 2| \log h|),\quad K_{n;1}(u)-K_{n;1}(\tilde u_ n)=O(h^ 2).\) The procedure can be directly combined with existing routines. It can be applied to higher order elements and to other boundary value problems. Numerical experiments support the theoretical results.