The treatment of constraints due to standard boundary conditions in the context of the mixed Web-spline finite element method
Authors: Koubaiti Ouadie , EL Fakkoussi Said , El-Mekkaoui Jaouad , Moustachir Hassan , Elkhalfi Ahmed , Pruncu Catalin I. 
Published: February 2021

Purpose

This paper aims to propose a new boundary condition and a web-spline basis of finite element space approximation to remedy the problems of constraints due to homogeneous and non-homogeneous; Dirichlet boundary conditions. This paper considered the two-dimensional linear elasticity equation of Navier–Lamé with the condition CAB. The latter allows to have a total insertion of the essential boundary condition in the linear system obtained; without using a numerical method as Lagrange multiplier. This study have developed mixed finite element; method using the B-splines Web-spline space. These provide an exact implementation of the homogeneous; Dirichlet boundary conditions, which removes the constraints caused by the standard; conditions. This paper showed the existence and the uniqueness of the weak solution, as well as the convergence of the numerical solution for the quadratic case are proved. The weighted extended B-spline; approach have become a much more workmanlike solution.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, this study used the implementation of weighted finite element methods to solve the Navier–Lamé system with a new boundary condition CA, B (Koubaiti et al., 2020), that generalises the well-known basis, especially the Dirichlet and the Neumann conditions. The novel proposed boundary condition permits to use a single Matlab code, which summarises all kind of boundary conditions encountered in the system. By using this model is possible to save time and programming recourses while reap several programs in a single directory.

Findings

The results have shown that the Web-spline-based quadratic-linear finite elements satisfy the inf–sup condition, which is necessary for existence and uniqueness of the solution. It was demonstrated by the existence of the discrete solution. A full convergence was established using the numerical solution for the quadratic case. Due to limited regularity of the Navier–Lamé problem, it will not change by increasing the degree of the Web-spline. The computed relative errors and their rates indicate that they are of order 1/H. Thus, it was provided their theoretical validity for the numerical solution stability. The advantage of this problem that uses the CA, B boundary condition is associated to reduce Matlab programming complexity.

Originality/value

The mixed finite element method is a robust technique to solve difficult challenges from engineering and physical sciences using the partial differential equations. Some of the important applications include structural mechanics, fluid flow, thermodynamics and electromagnetic fields (Zienkiewicz and Taylor, 2000) that are mainly based on the approximation of Lagrange. However, this type of approximation has experienced a great restriction in the level of domain modelling, especially in the case of complicated boundaries such as that in the form of curvilinear graphs. Recently, the research community tried to develop a new way of approximation based on the so-called B-spline that seems to have superior results in solving the engineering problems.