On the reference mapping for quadrilateral and hexahedral finite elements on multilevel adaptive grids (Q2641926)

The authors study the reference mappings for quadrilateral and hexahedral finite elements. They consider multilevel adaptive grids which are generated from an arbitrary shape regular coarse grid by adaptive refinement allowing hanging nodes. In applications, these grids are well suited to resolve geometric structures of different scales. They prove that the reference mapping on multilevel adaptive grids behaves -- up to a perturbation depending on the mesh size -- like an affine mapping. Some estimates for the derivatives of the reference mapping are used to prove optimal and quasi-optimal estimates of the interpolation error under the assumption that the finite dimensional function space on the reference element contains the space of the polynomials with total degree at most \(r\).