Robust methods for multiscale coarse approximations of diffusion models in perforated domains

Abstract

For the Poisson equation posed in a domain containing a large number of polygonal perforations, we propose a low-dimensional coarse approximation space based on a coarse polygonal partitioning of the domain. Similarly to other multiscale numerical methods, this coarse space is spanned by locally discrete harmonic basis functions. Along the subdomain boundaries, the basis functions are piecewise polynomial. The main contribution of this article is an error estimate regarding the H1-projection over the coarse space; this error estimate depends only on the regularity of the solution over the edges of the coarse partitioning. For a specific edge refinement procedure, the error analysis establishes superconvergence of the method even if the true solution has a low general regularity. Additionally, this contribution numerically explores the combination of the coarse space with domain decomposition (DD) methods. This combination leads to an efficient two-level iterative linear solver which reaches the fine-scale finite element error in few iterations. It also bodes well as a preconditioner for Krylov methods and provides scalability with respect to the number of subdomains.