The penetration function and its application to microscale problems (Q943935)

An elliptic problem with jumping coefficients on a microscale is considered. Assume that a macroscopic solution has been computed by homogenization. This paper examines the problem of how to accurately recover the microscale features of the solution from the known macroscopic one. A natural concept is the solution of the elliptic problem on a small subdomain with boundary values from the homogenized solution. It is shown that the result is less accurate than usually expected. To this end, a function called \textit{penetration function} is introduced.