Midterm Project, FEM accuracy for PDE's with highly discontinuous coefficients,
Due March 23, 1998

MATH 7664: Iterative Methods in Numerical Linear Algebra
Spring 1998. University of Colorado at Denver


INSTRUCTOR:
Prof. Andrew Knyazev
Office: CU (Dravo) 644. Phone: 556-8102.
Office hours: Tue 3pm - 6pm (or by appointment)
WWW: http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~aknyazev

Students are welcome to communicate with each other and the teacher on-line using the Web page
http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~aknyazev/teaching/98/7664/comments

Project Description:
We consider a parametric family of homogeneous Dirichlet boundary value problems for the diffusion equation -div( k grad u)=f with the diffusion coefficient k=k(x) equal to a small constant, our parameter, in a subdomain. Such problems are not uniformly well-posed when the parameter gets small. We investigate numerically FEM accuracy in the standard parameter-independent Sobolev norm. We consider a traditional FEM with the only additional assumption that the boundary of the subdomain with the small coefficient does not cut any finite element. Our goal is to look into dependence of the FEM error on the parameter under assumption that the solution is piecewise smooth. We consider three model problems: a square divided into 2 rectangles, a square divided into 4 squares, and an L-shaped domain divided into 2 rectangles.

The Report in HTML and PostScript forms.

Numerical results of the project were included in the paper:
A. V. Knyazev and Olof Widlund, Lavrentiev Regularization + Ritz Approximation = Uniform Finite Element Error Estimates for Differential Equations with Rough Coefficients, Submitted to Mathematics of Computation. Published as a technical report UCD-CCM 132, 1998, at the Center for Computational Mathematics, University of Colorado at Denver.