An analysis of finite element locking in a parameter dependent model problem

Abstract

We consider the bilinear finite element approximation of smooth solutions to a simple parameter dependent elliptic model problem, the problem of highly anisotropic heat conduction. We show that under favorable circumstances that depend on both the finite element mesh and on the type of boundary conditions, the effect of parametric locking of the standard FEM can be reduced by a simple variational crime. In our analysis we split the error in two orthogonal components, the approximation error and the consistency error, and obtain different bounds for these separate components. Also some numerical results are shown.