Access Type
Open Access Dissertation
Date of Award
January 2017
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
Mathematics
First Advisor
Zhimin Zhang
Abstract
Gradient recovery technique is widely used to reconstruct a better numerical gradient from a finite element solution, for mesh smoothing,
a posteriori error estimate and adaptive finite element methods. The PPR technique generates a higher order approximation of the gradient on a patch of mesh elements around each mesh vertex. It can be used for different finite element methods for different problems. This dissertation presents recovery techniques for the weak Galerkin methods and as well as applications of gradient recovery on various of problems, including elliptic problems, interface problems, and Stokes problems.
Our first target is to develop a boundary strategy for the current PPR algorithm. The current accuracy of PPR near boundaries is not as good as that in the interior of the domain. It might be even worse than without recovery. Some special treatments are needed to improve the accuracy of PPR on the boundary. In this thesis, we present two boundary recovery strategies to resolve the problem caused by boundaries. Numerical experiments indicate that both of the newly proposed strategies made an improvement to the original PPR.
Our second target is to generalize PPR to the weak Galerkin methods. Different from the standard finite element methods, the weak Galerkin methods use a different set of degrees of freedom. Instead of the weak gradient information, we are able to obtain the recovered gradient information for the numerical solution in the generalization of PPR. In the PPR process, we are also able to recover the function value at the nodal points which will produce a global continuous solution instead of piecewise continuous function.
Our third target is to apply our proposed strategy and WGPPR to interface problems. We treat an interface as a boundary when performing gradient recovery, and the jump condition on the interface can be well captured by the function recovery process.
In addition, adaptive methods based on WGPPR recovery type a posteriori error estimator is proposed and numerically tested in this thesis. Application on the elliptic problem and interface problem validate the effectiveness and robustness of our algorithm. Furthermore, WGPPR has been applied to 3D problem and Stokes problem as well. Superconvergent phenomenon is again observed.
Recommended Citation
Zhao, Ren, "Polynomial Preserving Recovery For Weak Galerkin Methods And Their Applications" (2017). Wayne State University Dissertations. 1904.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/1904