On stable representations of Bell elements (Q2192482)

A locally supported spline basis on a triangulation is described. It consists of \(C^1\) quintic polynomial splines that are fixed by prescribing at the vertices function values and derivatives up to order 2 (Argyris elements). To overcome instability several variants are proposed. First the length of the edges is taken into account to improve the nodal basis. On each triangle a kind of bivariate B-spline functions and Bézier polynomials are used to represent the function. That leads to provable stability. Moreover, under some constraints on the triangulation, the basis can be made non-negative. That involves however a quadratic constrained optimization problem and linearizing the constraints re-introduces some instability. The paper is largely self-contained and recalls all the necessary definitions and properties. A brief comparison with other B-spline-like bases from the literature is made, and several numerical experiments illustrate the performance of the proposed elements.