Abstract
We propose and analyze a discretization scheme that combines the discontinuous Petrov–Galerkin and finite element methods. The underlying model problem is of general diffusion-advection-reaction type on bounded domains, with decomposition into two sub-domains. We propose a heterogeneous variational formulation that is of the ultra-weak (Petrov–Galerkin) form with broken test space in one part, and of Bubnov–Galerkin form in the other. A standard discretization with conforming approximation spaces and appropriate test spaces (optimal test functions for the ultra-weak part and standard test functions for the Bubnov–Galerkin part) gives rise to a coupled DPG-FEM scheme. We prove its well-posedness and quasi-optimal convergence. Numerical results confirm expected convergence orders.
1 Introduction
The discontinuous Petrov–Galerkin method with optimal test functions (DPG method) is an approximation scheme that makes the use of optimal test functions, cf. [1, 6, 8], feasible by considering broken test norms [9]. Optimal test functions are those which maximize discrete inf-sup numbers, and the broken form of test spaces and norms allows for their local calculation or approximation. In this form, the DPG method has been developed by Demkowicz and Gopalakrishnan; see [8, 9].
The DPG method has been designed having in mind problems where standard methods suffer from locking phenomena (of small inf-sup numbers) or, otherwise, require specific stabilization techniques. This is particularly the case with singularly perturbed problems where DPG schemes have made some contributions [11, 7, 2, 3, 17]. Nevertheless, in the current form most of the schemes are not cheap to implement. On the one hand, corresponding formulations have several unknowns as is the case with mixed finite elements. On the other hand, the efficient approximation of optimal test functions for singularly perturbed problems is ongoing research. For these reasons, advanced DPG techniques are best used for specific problems whereas finite elements are hard to beat when solving uniformly well-posed problems. Though, it has to be said, that in the latter cases DPG schemes can also be efficient and are competitive in general; cf. the software package developed by Roberts [18].
In this paper, we develop a discretization method that combines DPG techniques with standard finite elements. In this way, one can restrict the use of more expensive DPG approximations to regions where they are beneficial. Examples are reaction-advection-diffusion problems with small diffusivity in a reduced area, or transmission problems that couple a singularly perturbed problem with an unperturbed problem. In a previous publication [14], we have proposed such a combination with boundary elements to solve transmission problems of the Laplacian in the full space, and studied a singularly perturbed case of reaction diffusion in [13]. In this paper, we follow the general framework from [14]. There, the basis is set by a heterogeneous variational formulation consisting of an ultra-weak one in a bounded domain and variational boundary integral equations for the exterior unbounded part. Here, we combine an ultra-weak formulation with a standard variational form. We remark that this approach of combining different variational formulations has been systematically analyzed in [12]. Indeed, it is not essential to use an ultra-weak formulation for the DPG scheme, any well-posed formulation would work. Though, the overall strategy in [12] is to employ DPG techniques throughout whereas we combine different discretization techniques.
An important aspect of the DPG method is the inherent guaranteed error control by the computed residuals. For early computational experiments with adaptivity based on these residuals, see [10]. In [4], an a posteriori error analysis is given that includes data approximation errors. When coupling the DPG method with other discretizations, the inherent residuals for the DPG approximation have to be combined with appropriate estimators. For the case of boundary elements, see [14, 13], and for the DPG method dealing with contact conditions, see [15]. In this paper, we do not specifically deal with a posteriori error estimation.
Having set our heterogeneous formulation, we proceed to rewrite it by using the so-called trial-to-test operator (which maps the test space to the ansatz space). This is only done for the ultra-weak formulation. The whole system then transforms into one where spaces on the ansatz and test sides are identical. In this way, our heterogeneous variational formulation fits the Lax–Milgram framework just as in [14]. We prove coercivity under the condition that the trial-to-test operator is weighted by a sufficiently large constant. Then quasi-optimal convergence of a discretized version follows by standard arguments. When proving coercivity we follow steps that are similar to the ones when studying the coupling of DPG with boundary elements. But whereas [14] analyzes only the Laplacian, here we set up the scheme and prove coercivity for a general second-order equation of reaction-advection-diffusion type. Throughout, we assume that our problem is uniformly well posed, i.e., we do not study variations for singularly perturbed cases as in [13]. Also note that, since coefficients are variable, transmission problems can be treated the same way by selecting the sub-domains accordingly. One only has to move the possibly non-homogeneous jump data to the right-hand side functional.
The remainder of this paper is as follows: In Section 2, we start by formulating the model problem. A heterogeneous variational formulation is given in Section 2.1. There, we also state its well-posedness and coercivity (Theorem 2.2) and briefly mention a simplified case where continuity across the sub-domain interface is incorporated strongly (Corollary 2.4). The corresponding discrete DPG-FEM scheme is presented in Section 2.2. Its quasi-optimal convergence is announced in Theorem 2.5. Most technical details and proofs are given in Section 3. In Section 4, we report on some numerical experiments.
Furthermore, throughout the paper, suprema are taken over sets excluding the null element,
and the notation
2 Mathematical Setting and Main Results
Let
Here,
2.1 Heterogeneous Variational Formulation
In order to solve (2.1) by a combination of DPG method and finite elements, we
formulate the problem in a heterogeneous way, using different variational forms in different
parts of the domain. For ease of illustration, we restrict ourselves to two Lipschitz sub-domains
Assumption 2.1.
For
Standard and broken Sobolev spaces.
Essential for the DPG method is to use broken test spaces. Therefore, at this early stage
we consider a partitioning
Before describing the variational formulation, we introduce the Sobolev spaces we need.
For a domain
We also need
Now, related with
and
Here,
and analogously for
Heterogeneous formulation in
The ultra-weak formulation requires additional independent unknowns
Then we test the defining relation of
Here,
In
for
Solving (2.1) in Ω is equivalent to solving (in appropriate spaces)
(2.3) and (2.4) with homogeneous Dirichlet condition on
We formally distinguish between
such that
for any
This formulation can be used to define the combined DPG-FEM discretization,
but requires that
and define the coupling bilinear form
We will also need the bilinear form for
The construction of
The first term on the right-hand side is needed for consistency.
The last two terms are the ones that generate coercivity of the bilinear forms
The final combined ultra-weak primal formulation of (2.1) then reads
(2.9)
Note that, although in (2.9b) we test with functions
For reference, we explicitly specify the strong form of (2.9a):
By following [12], one can show that (2.9) is equivalent to (2.1),
so that, in particular, (2.9) has a unique solution; see also Remark 2.3 below.
However, since we will use different strategies for solving (2.9a) and (2.9b),
we need a slightly different representation.
To this end, we define the trial-to-test operator
Here,
with
and
One of our main results is the following theorem.
Theorem 2.2.
Let
Vice versa, if
Furthermore, the bilinear form
Proof.
By the assumptions on Ω, f,
The coercivity of
Remark 2.3.
Theorem 2.2 implies the well-posedness of formulation (2.9), and
the equivalence of (2.9) with problem (2.1),
in the same form as indicated in the theorem.
It is also equivalent to formulation (2.11) when
As previously mentioned, the continuity constraint
and the coupling bilinear form reduces to
The variational formulation becomes the following: For given
with
and
Analogously to Theorem 2.2, one obtains the well-posedness of (2.13) and
coercivity of
Corollary 2.4.
Let
Vice versa, if
Furthermore, for sufficiently large
2.2 Combined DPG-FEM Discretization
The coupled DPG-FEM method consists in solving (2.11) within finite-dimensional
subspaces
Note that this formulation includes the use of optimal test functions for the discretization
in
Our second main result is the following theorem.
Theorem 2.5.
If
Proof.
The statement is a direct implication of the U-coercivity of
Remark 2.6.
We note that also the discrete scheme can be changed to impose strongly the continuity of the approximations
of
3 Technical Details and Proof of Coercivity
We start with recalling the
Lemma 3.1.
The bilinear forms
for all
Proof.
Noting that
we obtain
for
We continue with some properties of the operator B, cf. (2.10), when restricted
to the space incorporating homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions on the whole of
Lemma 3.2.
The operator
bounded independently of the mesh
Proof.
This is a particular case of the different variational formulations studied in [5, Example 3.7]. More generally, in [5], Carstensen, Demkowicz and Gopalakrishnan proved that by “breaking” a continuous variational formulation of a well-posed problem (by introducing broken test spaces) and using canonical trace norms, this does not alter the well-posedness of the formulation. ∎
Let us introduce the trace space
The boundedness of this operator is immediate, and analogous to the case of the Laplacian on a single domain considered in [14, Lemma 4].
Lemma 3.3.
The operator
In the following, we identify the kernel of B when acting on the full space
Lemma 3.4.
The operator
Proof.
These statements can be proved analogously to the case of the Laplacian; cf. [14, Lemmas 11 and 12]. ∎
Of course, we also need continuity of the bilinear forms
Lemma 3.5.
The bilinear forms
3.1 Proof of Coercivity, Statement (2.12) in Theorem 2.2
We are now ready to prove the U-coercivity of the bilinear form
Let
By Lemma 3.4, the
The last identity is due to the well-known relations of the trial-to-test operator Θ,
According to Lemma 3.4, the operator
A combination of (3.1), (3.4), and (3.5) then gives
We continue by considering
Noting that, cf. (2.7),
an application of Lemma 3.1 gives
Relation (3.1) can also be written as
so that the previous bound becomes
Now, by recalling the definitions of
The last term in (3.8) can be bounded by duality, the continuity of
Combining this bound with (3.6) and (3.8) and applying Young’s inequality, we find that
for a sufficiently large constant
4 Numerical Experiments
In this section, we report on two numerical experiments. In both of them we choose
where
The resulting method is called practical DPG method, and was analyzed in [16].
In that work, it was shown that the additional discretization error of using
where
where
for any
as well as the so-called energy error of the DPG part
cf. (3.4). In both experiments, we use a sequence of meshes resulting from uniform mesh refinements. The quasi-optimality result of Theorem 2.5 and well-known approximation results then show that
Here, N denotes the overall number of degrees of freedom of
4.1 Experiment 1
We choose
The remaining parameters in equation (2.1) are chosen as
4.2 Experiment 2
We choose
The remaining parameters in equation 2.1 are chosen as
Funding source: Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica
Award Identifier / Grant number: 1150056
Award Identifier / Grant number: 1170672
Award Identifier / Grant number: ACT1118
Award Identifier / Grant number: PFB-03
Funding statement: We gratefully acknowledge financial support by CONICYT through FONDECYT projects 1150056 and 1170672, Anillo ACT1118 (ANANUM), and BASAL project CMM, Universidad de Chile, Chile.
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