Approximation properties of primal discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin method on general quadrilateral meshes

Abstract

We consider the approximation properties of primal discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin (DPG) method on quadrilateral meshes. We show how the previous convergence results as well as the Aubin-Nitsche type duality arguments can be extended to cover arbitrary convex quadrilateral elements with bilinear isomorphisms. The arguments are based on the approximation theory of quadrilateral vector finite element spaces associated to the numerical flux variable of the DPG approximation. The theoretical results are validated by a numerical experiment that features also a comparison between the primal DPG method and a conventional least squares finite element method with the same number of degrees of freedom.