Mortar Finite Element Discretization Research Articles

A residual based error estimator for mortar finite element discretizations

A residual based error estimator for the approximation of linear elliptic boundary value problems by nonconforming finite element methods is introduced and analyzed. In particular, we consider mortar finite element techniques restricting ourselves to geometrically conforming domain decomposition methods using P1 approximations in each subdomain. Additionally, a residual based error estimator for Crouzeix-Raviart elements of lowest order is presented and compared with the error estimator obtained in the more general mortar situation. It is shown that the computational effort of the error estimator can be considerably reduced if the special structure of the Lagrange multiplier is taken into account.

A Multigrid Algorithm for the Mortar Finite Element Method

The objective of this paper is to develop and analyze a multigrid algorithm for the system of equations arising from the mortar finite element discretization of second order elliptic boundary value problems. In order to establish the inf-sup condition for the saddle point formulation and to motivate the subsequent treatment of the discretizations, we first revisit briefly the theoretical concept of the mortar finite element method. Employing suitable mesh-dependent norms we verify the validity of the Ladyzhenskaya--Babuska--Brezzi (LBB) condition for the resulting mixed method and prove an L2 error estimate. This is the key for establishing a suitable approximation property for our multigrid convergence proof via a duality argument. In fact, we are able to verify optimal multigrid efficiency based on a smoother which is applied to the whole coupled system of equations. We conclude with several numerical tests of the proposed scheme which confirm the theoretical results and show the efficiency and the robustness of the method even in situations not covered by the theory.