Full weak Galerkin finite element discretizations for poroelasticity problems in the primal formulation

Abstract

This paper develops novel finite element solvers for linear poroelasticity problems on quadrilateral meshes. These solvers are based on the primal formulations of linear elasticity and Darcy flow. Specifically, the fluid pressure and solid displacement are approximated by scalar- or vector-valued polynomials of degree k≥0 separately in element interiors and on edges. The discrete weak gradients of these shape functions are established in the broken (vector- or matrix-version) Arbogast–Correa spaces for approximations of the classical gradients in the variational forms. These weak Galerkin spatial discretizations are combined with the implicit Euler or Crank–Nicolson temporal discretizations to develop locking-free numerical solvers that have optimal order (k+1) convergence rates in pressure, velocity, displacement, stress, and dilation. Rigorous analysis is presented and illustrated by numerical experiments on popular test cases.