Decoupling simulation accuracy from mesh quality

Teseo Schneider, Yixin Hu, Jérémie Dumas, Xifeng Gao, Daniele Panozzo, Denis Zorin

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

For a given PDE problem, three main factors affect the accuracy of FEM solutions: basis order, mesh resolution, and mesh element quality. The first two factors are easy to control, while controlling element shape quality is a challenge, with fundamental limitations on what can be achieved. We propose to use p-refinement (increasing element degree) to decouple the approximation error of the finite element method from the domain mesh quality for elliptic PDEs. Our technique produces an accurate solution even on meshes with badly shaped elements, with a slightly higher running time due to the higher cost of high-order elements. We demonstrate that it is able to automatically adapt the basis to badly shaped elements, ensuring an error consistent with high-quality meshing, without any per-mesh parameter tuning. Our construction reduces to traditional fixed-degree FEM methods on high-quality meshes with identical performance. Our construction decreases the burden on meshing algorithms, reducing the need for often expensive mesh optimization and automatically compensates for badly shaped elements, which are present due to boundary constraints or limitations of current meshing methods. By tackling mesh generation and finite element simulation jointly, we obtain a pipeline that is both more efficient and more robust than combinations of existing state of the art meshing and FEM algorithms.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number280
JournalACM Transactions on Graphics
Volume37
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 2018

Keywords

  • Error estimates
  • Finite elements
  • Mesh quality
  • P-refinement

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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