Two-dimensional numerical manifold method with multilayer covers

In order to reach the best numerical properties with the numerical manifold method(NMM),uniform finite element meshes are always favorite while constructing mathematical covers,where all the elements are congruent.In the presence of steep gradients or strong singularities,in principle,the locally-defined special functions can be added into the NMM space by means of the partition of unity,but they are not available to those complex problems with heterogeneity or nonlinearity,necessitating local refinement on uniform meshes.This is believed to be one of the most important open issues in NMM.In this study multilayer covers are proposed to solve this issue.In addition to the first layer cover which is the global cover and covers the whole problem domain,the second and higher layer covers with smaller elements,called local covers,are used to cover those local regions with steep gradients or strong singularities.The global cover and the local covers have their own partition of unity,and they all participate in the approximation to the solution.Being advantageous over the existing procedures,the proposed approach is easy to deal with any arbitrary-layer hanging nodes with no need to construct super-elements with variable number of edge nodes or introduce the Lagrange multipliers to enforce the continuity between small and big elements.With no limitation to cover layers,meanwhile,the creation of an even error distribution over the whole problem domain is significantly facilitated.Some typical examples with steep gradients or strong singularities are analyzed to demonstrate the capacity of the proposed approach.