English

Variational formulation and numerical analysis of linear elliptic equations in nondivergence form with Cordes coefficients

Numerical Analysis 2017-01-17 v4

Abstract

This paper studies formulations of second-order elliptic partial differential equations in nondivergence form on convex domains as equivalent variational problems. The first formulation is that of Smears \& S\"uli [SIAM J.\ Numer.\ Anal.\ 51(2013), pp.\ 2088--2106.], and the second one is a new symmetric formulation based on a least-squares functional. These formulations enable the use of standard finite element techniques for variational problems in subspaces of H2H^2 as well as mixed finite element methods from the context of fluid computations. Besides the immediate quasi-optimal a~priori error bounds, the variational setting allows for a~posteriori error control with explicit constants and adaptive mesh-refinement. The convergence of an adaptive algorithm is proved. Numerical results on uniform and adaptive meshes are included.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1606.05631,
  title  = {Variational formulation and numerical analysis of linear elliptic equations in nondivergence form with Cordes coefficients},
  author = {Dietmar Gallistl},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.05631},
  year   = {2017}
}