QUADRILATERAL MESH

Several quadrilateral shape regular mesh conditions commonly used in the finite element method are proven to be equivalent. Their influence on the finite element interpolation error and the consistency error committed by nonconforming finite elements are investigated. The effect of the Bi-Section Condition and its extended version (1+α)-Section Condition on the degenerate mesh conditions is also checked. The necessity of the Bi-Section Condition in finite elements is underpinned by means of counterexamples.

A new a priori error estimate of nonconforming finite element methods

This paper is devoted to a new error analysis of nonconforming finite element methods.Compared with the classic error analysis in literature,only weak continuity,the F-E-M-Test for nonconforming finite element spaces,and basic Hm regularity for exact solutions of 2m-th order elliptic problems under consideration are assumed.The analysis is motivated by ideas from a posteriori error estimates and projection average operators.One main ingredient is a novel decomposition for some key average terms on(n.1)-dimensional faces by introducing a piecewise constant projection,which defines the generalization to more general nonconforming finite elements of the results in literature.The analysis and results herein are conjectured to apply for all nonconforming finite elements in literature.

On the error bounds of nonconforming finite elements

We prove that the error estimates of a large class of nonconforming finite elements are dominated by their approximation errors, which means that the well-known Cea's lemma is still valid for these nonconforming finite element methods. Furthermore, we derive the error estimates in both energy and L2 norms under the regularity assumption u ∈ H1+s(Ω) with any s > 0. The extensions to other related problems are possible.

On the convergence rate of a parallel nonoverlapping domain decomposition method

In recent years,a nonoverlapping domain decomposition iterative procedure,which is based on using Robin-type boundary conditions as information transmission conditions on the subdomain interfaces,has been developed and analyzed.It is known that the convergence rate of this method is 1-O(h),where h is mesh size.In this paper,the convergence rate is improved to be 1-O(h1/2 H-1/2)sometime by choosing suitable parameter,where H is the subdomain size.Counter examples are constructed to show that our convergence estimates are sharp,which means that the convergence rate cannot be better than 1-O(h1/2H-1/2)in a certain case no matter how parameter is chosen.

Two lower order nonconforming quadrilateral elements for the Reissner-Mindlin plate

This paper generalizes two nonconforming rectangular elements of the Reissner-Mindlin plate to the quadrilateral mesh. The first quadrilateral element uses the usual conforming bilinear element to approximate both components of the rotation, and the modified nonconforming rotated Q1 element enriched with the intersected term on each element to approximate the displacement, whereas the second one uses the enriched modified nonconforming rotated Q1 element to approximate both the rotation and the displacement. Both elements employ a more complicated shear force space to overcome the shear force locking, which will be described in detail in the introduction. We prove that both methods converge at optimal rates uniformly in the plate thickness t and the mesh distortion parameter in both the H1-and the L2-norms, and consequently they are locking free.