MATHEMATICS OF COMPUTATION Volume 79, Number 272, October 2010, Pages 1915–1955 S 0025-5718(2010)02372-5 Article electronically published on May 25, 2010
A NEW MULTISCALE FINITE ELEMENT METHOD FOR HIGH-CONTRAST ELLIPTIC INTERFACE PROBLEMS
C.-C. CHU, I. G. GRAHAM, AND T.-Y. HOU
Abstract. We introduce a new multiscale finite element method which is able to accurately capture solutions of elliptic interface problems with high contrast coefficients by using only coarse quasiuniform meshes, and without resolving the interfaces. A typical application would be the modelling of flow in a porous medium containing a number of inclusions of low (or high) per- meability embedded in a matrix of high (respectively low) permeability. Our method is H1- conforming, with degrees of freedom at the nodes of a triangular mesh and requiring the solution of subgrid problems for the basis functions on elements which straddle the coefficient interface but which use standard linear approximation otherwise. A key point is the introduction of novel coefficient- dependent boundary conditions for the subgrid problems. Under moderate assumptions, we prove that our methods have (optimal) convergence rate of 2 O(h) in the energy norm and O(h )intheL2 norm where h is the (coarse) mesh diameter and the hidden constants in these estimates are independent of the “contrast” (i.e. ratio of largest to smallest value) of the PDE coeffi- cient. For standard elements the best estimate in the energy norm would be O(h1/2−ε) with a hidden constant which in general depends on the contrast. The new interior boundary conditions depend not only on the contrast of the coefficients, but also on the angles of intersection of the interface with the element edges.
1. Introduction In this paper we present a new application of multiscale finite element methods for the classical elliptic problem in weak form A ∇ ·∇ ∈ 1 (1.1) (x) u(x) v(x)dx = F (x)v(x)dx , v H0 (Ω) , Ω Ω where the solution u ∈ H1(Ω) is required to satisfy a Dirichlet condition on ∂Ωand F is given on a bounded domain Ω ⊂ R2. To concentrate on the essential aspects of this new theory we primarily treat the homogeneous Dirichlet problem when the boundary of Ω is a convex polygon. (These are not essential restrictions: All our results are true for smooth boundaries as well. Similar results could be obtained for
Received by the editor February 24, 2009. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 65N12, 65N30. Key words and phrases. Second-order elliptic problems, interfaces, high contrast, multiscale finite elements, non-periodic media, convergence. The authors thank Rob Scheichl and Jens Markus Melenk for useful discussions. The second author acknowledges financial support from the Applied and Computational Mathematics Group at California Institute of Technology. The research of the third author was supported in part by an NSF Grant DMS-0713670 and a DOE Grant DE-FG02-06ER25727.