Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Nonconforming Finite Element Method For The 2d Vector Laplacian, Mary Barker

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The vector Laplacian presents difficulties in finite element ap- proximation. It is well known that for nonconvex domains, H1- conforming approximation spaces form a closed subspace of the solution space H(div; Ω) ∩ H(curl; Ω). Hence H1-conforming approximations will fail to converge. This is problematic as it is highly difficult to construct more general finite dimensional ap- proximation spaces for this space. We will present an extension of a nonconforming method introduced by Brenner et al. The method was originally given for P1-nonconforming spaces in two dimensions. Our extension is given for degree r polynomials, but which agrees with the …