Analysis of some moving spacetime finite element methods.pdfVIP

c SIAM J Numer Anal So ciety for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Vol No pp February ANALYSIS OF SOME MOVING SPACETIME FINITE ELEMENT METHODS RANDOLPH E BANK y AND RAFAEL F SANTOS z Abstract Two spacetime nite element metho ds for solving timedep endent partial dierential equations are dened and analyzed The metho ds are based on the use of isoparametric nite elements to implicitly dene the time discretization on a moving mesh in the space dimensions One metho d allows for adding and deleting knots in a continuous fashion while the other allows for discontinuous changes in the mesh static rezone A detailed convergence analysis for a mo del parab olic equation with a p ossibly large convection term is presented Here we obtain symmetric best approximation error estimates similar to those obtained by Dup ont Math Comp pp for the semidiscrete case Key words moving nite element metho ds convection diusion equations isoparametric nite elements AMS sub ject classications M M Intro duction The use of adaptive metho ds can greatly improve the accuracy of nite element computations and has b een among the most imp ortant advances in the eld over the past decade The goal of such pro cedures has b een to automate the creation of nite element spaces which are esp ecially well suited to a given problem Generally this means concentrating the degrees of freedom asso ciated with the nite element space in regions where the solution is changing rapidly Often such regions represent a small fraction of the physical domain although in timedep end