Immersed finite element methods for 4th order differential equations (Q544234)

The paper is devoted to a study of numerical methods for fourth order boundary value problems involving ordinary or partial differential equations with discontinuous (mainly, piecewise constant) coefficients. Such problems are commonly known as interface problems. Conventional finite elements often perform in an unsatisfactory way when applied to such problems because of the discontinuity of the coefficients. A standard way to overcome this obstacle is to use discretizations that explicitly take into account the locations of the discontinuities; however, a different path is proposed here. To be precise, the approach is based on the idea of immersed finite elements, i.e., a finite element method with classical basis functions on those elements that do not contain a discontinuity of the coefficients, and specially adapted basis functions for the elements with a discontinuity of the coefficient function. A detailed description of the constructions is given, and a number of numerical examples is presented. These examples indicate that the rate of convergence of the algorithm is optimal, but neither the proof of this property nor any other theoretical error analysis is provided.