Adaptive computations on conforming quadtree meshes

Abstract

In this paper, the quadtree data structure and conforming polygonal interpolants are used to develop an h-adaptive finite element method. Quadtree is a hierarchical data structure that is computationally attractive for adaptive numerical simulations. Mesh generation and adaptive refinement of quadtree meshes is straight-forward. However, finite elements are non-conforming on quadtree meshes due to level-mismatches between adjacent elements, which results in the presence of so-called hanging nodes. In this study, we use meshfree (natural-neighbor, nn) basis functions on a reference element combined with an affine map to construct conforming approximations on quadtree meshes. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and performance of the proposed h-adaptive finite element method.