A partially penalty immersed Crouzeix-Raviart finite element method for interface problems

Abstract

Abstract The elliptic equations with discontinuous coefficients are often used to describe the problems of the multiple materials or fluids with different densities or conductivities or diffusivities. In this paper we develop a partially penalty immersed finite element (PIFE) method on triangular grids for anisotropic flow models, in which the diffusion coefficient is a piecewise definite-positive matrix. The standard linear Crouzeix-Raviart type finite element space is used on non-interface elements and the piecewise linear Crouzeix-Raviart type immersed finite element (IFE) space is constructed on interface elements. The piecewise linear functions satisfying the interface jump conditions are uniquely determined by the integral averages on the edges as degrees of freedom. The PIFE scheme is given based on the symmetric, nonsymmetric or incomplete interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin formulation. The solvability of the method is proved and the optimal error estimates in the energy norm are obtained. Numerical experiments are presented to confirm our theoretical analysis and show that the newly developed PIFE method has optimal-order convergence in the L 2 $L^{2}$ norm as well. In addition, numerical examples also indicate that this method is valid for both the isotropic and the anisotropic elliptic interface problems.

Keywords

• elliptic interface problems
• discontinuous coefficients
• partially penalty
• immersed finite element method
• Crouzeix-Raviart element
• optimal-order error estimates