Splines over regular triangulations in numerical simulation

Abstract

We investigate the use of smooth spline spaces over regular triangulations as a tool in (isogeometric) Galerkin methods. In particular, we focus on box splines over three-directional meshes. Box splines are multivariate generalizations of univariate cardinal B-splines sharing the same properties. Tensor-product B-splines with uniform knots are a special case of box splines. The use of box splines over three-directional meshes has several advantages compared with tensor-product B-splines, including enhanced flexibility in the treatment of the geometry and stiffness matrices with stronger sparsity. Boundary conditions are imposed in a weak form to avoid the construction of special boundary functions. We illustrate the effectiveness of the approach by means of a selection of numerical examples.