A two-level local projection stabilisation on uniformly refined triangular meshes (Q1762501)

The authors consider a two-level local projection stabilisation (LPS) on triangular meshes based on the refinement of a macro cell into three child cells by connecting the barycentre with the vertices of the macro cell. This refinement technique leads to non-nested meshes with large inner angles and to non-nested finite element spaces. It is shown that one can use the red refinement (RR) where a triangle is divided into four child cells by connecting the midpoints of the edges. This avoids the above mentioned disadvantages. For the RR, on can establish a local inf-sup condition for the continuous, piecewise polynomial approximation spaces of order less than or equal to \(r\geq 2\) living on the refined mesh and discontinuous, piecewise polynomial projection spaces of order less than or equal to \(r-1\) living on the coarser mesh. Numerical tests compare the local projection stabilisation resulting from both refinement rules in case of convection-diffusion problems. It is observed that the expected orders 5/2 in the LPS norm and 3 in the \(L^2\) norm are obtained provided the mesh is fine enough. One reason for the strange orders on the barycentrically refined meshes is the geometric stiffness of the meshes since the refinement gives no additional flexibility to approximate the steep layers. This is in contrast to the regularly refined meshes where the additional geometric degrees of freedom allow that layers could be approximated much better.