Abstract

We analyze several possibilities to prescribe boundary conditions in the context of immersed boundary methods. As basic approximation technique we consider the finite element method with a mesh that does not match the boundary of the computational domain, and therefore Dirichlet boundary conditions need to be prescribed in an approximate way. As starting variational approach we consider Nitsche's methods, and we then move to two options that yield non‐symmetric problems but that turned out to be robust and efficient. The essential idea is to use the degrees of freedom of certain nodes of the finite element mesh to minimize the difference between the exact and the approximated boundary condition

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a way to weakly prescribe Dirichlet boundary conditions in embedded finite element meshes. The key feature of the method is that the algorithmic parameter of the formulation which allows to ensure stability is independent of the numerical approximation, relatively small, and can be fixed a priori. Moreover, the formulation is symmetric for symmetric problems. An additional element‐discontinuous stress field is used to enforce the boundary conditions in the Poisson problem. Additional terms are required in order to guarantee stability in the convection–diffusion equation and the Stokes problem. The proposed method is then easily extended to the transient Navier–Stokes equations.

Abstract

Imposing essential boundary conditions is a key issue in mesh-free methods. The mesh-free interpolation does not verify the Kronecker delta property and, therefore, the imposition of prescribed values is not as straightforward as for the finite element method. The aim of this paper is to present a general overview on the existing techniques to enforce essential boundary conditions in Galerkin based mesh-free methods. Special attention is paid to the mesh-free coupling with finite elements for the imposition of prescribed values and to methods based on a modification of the Galerkin weak form. Particular examples are used to analyze and compare their performance in different situations.

Abstract

A strategy to couple continuous Galerkin (CG) and hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) discretizations based only on the HDG hybrid variable is presented for linear thermal and elastic problems. The hybrid CG-HDG coupling exploits the definition of the numerical flux and the trace of the solution on the mesh faces to impose the transmission conditions between the CG and HDG subdomains. The con- tinuity of the solution is imposed in the CG problem via Nitsche’s method, whereas the equilibrium of the flux at the interface is naturally enforced as a Neumann con- dition in the HDG global problem. The proposed strategy does not affect the core structure of CG and HDG discretizations. In fact, the resulting formulation leads to a minimally-intrusive coupling, suitable to be integrated in existing CG and HDG libraries. Numerical experiments in two and three dimensions show optimal global convergence of the stress and superconvergence of the displacement field, locking-free approximation, as well as the potential to treat structural problems of engineering interest featuring multiple materials with compressible and nearly incompressible behaviors. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Computational mechanics.