A comparison of mortar and Nitsche techniques for linear elasticity (Q2505619)

The authors consider the Nitsche and mortar non-overlaping domain decomposition techniques for the Lamé operator arising in linear elasticity. Both methods can be applied to non-matching triangulations. They compare the theoretical results on the discretization errors and provide several numerical examples using linear and quadratic finite element spaces. In particular they reformulate the mortar method and interpret it as a Nitsche variant based on inexact integrals. The authors use a multigrid algorithm to solve the algebraic systems. Although there is a mesh dependent bilinear form, optimal \(W\)-cycle convergence rates can be obtained. Lastly numerical results illustrating the performance and flexibility of the discretization techniques are given. Attention is devoted to the comparison of the \(L^2\)-error, the \(H^1\)-error and errors on the skeleton for both methods. Asymptotic convergence rates for the \(W\)-cycle are given. As predicted by the theory, level independent multigrid convergence rates can be observed.