Numerical integration with Taylor truncations for the quadrilateral and hexahedral finite elements (Q2372933)

Unlike for traditional triangular and tetrahedral finite elements integrals of rational functions instead of polynomials have to be evaluated in the case of quadrilateral and hexahedral finite elements. But, there is no general mathematical justification for quadrature rules which ensure to retain the optimal order approximation of the quadrilateral and hexahedral finite elements. The author succeeds in overcoming the difficulties in the case of nested refinement of general quadrilaterals and hexahedra. These cells are considered via a mapping as images of the reference cube \([-1,1]^n\), \(n=2,3\) [cf. \textit{S. Zhang}, Numer. Math. 98, 559--579 (2004; Zbl 1065.65135)]. Defining a measure of non-parallelism it is shown that the refined grid cells converge rapidly to parallelograms and parallelepipeds. Based on this observation the rational functions for higher order quadrilateral and hexahedral elements are replaced by their Taylor expansions with truncations depending on the finite element order, and it is proven that resulting Gaussian quadrature rules for the corresponding integrals of polynomials on the reference cube retain the optimal order approximation of the finite elements. The theoretic results are verified and discussed by numerical tests using 2D and 3D Poisson equations with Dirichlet boundary conditions. It is not claimed that the proposed method is more efficient in computation than other algorithms but, the order of the mentioned accuracy of the numerical method is ensured.