Gerard Awanou

Douglas N. Arnold, Gerard Awanou

We give a new, simple, dimension-independent definition of the serendipity finite element family. The shape functions are the span of all monomials which are linear in at least s-r of the variables where s is the degree of the monomial or, equivalently, whose superlinear degree (total degree with respect to variables entering at least quadratically) is at most r. The degrees of freedom are given by moments of degree at most r-2d on each face of dimension d. We establish unisolvence and a geometric decomposition of the space.

Douglas N. Arnold, Gerard Awanou

We develop a family of finite element spaces of differential forms defined on cubical meshes in any number of dimensions. The family contains elements of all polynomial degrees and all form degrees. In two dimensions, these include the serendipity finite elements and the rectangular BDM elements. In three dimensions they include a recent generalization of the serendipity spaces, and new H(curl) and H(div) finite element spaces. Spaces in the family can be combined to give finite element subcomplexes of the de Rham complex which satisfy the basic hypotheses of the finite element exterior calculus, and hence can be used for stable discretization of a variety of problems. The construction and properties of the spaces are established in a uniform manner using finite element exterior calculus.

Douglas N. Arnold, Gerard Awanou, Ragnar Winther

This paper presents a nonconforming finite element approximation of the space of symmetric tensors with square integrable divergence, on tetrahedral meshes. Used for stress approximation together with the full space of piecewise linear vector fields for displacement, this gives a stable mixed finite element method which is shown to be linearly convergent for both the stress and displacement, and which is significantly simpler than any stable conforming mixed finite element method. The method may be viewed as the three-dimensional analogue of a previously developed element in two dimensions. As in that case, a variant of the method is proposed as well, in which the displacement approximation is reduced to piecewise rigid motions and the stress space is reduced accordingly, but the linear convergence is retained.

Gerard Awanou

The lowest order nonconforming rectangular element in three dimensions involves 54 degrees of freedom for the stress and 12 degrees of freedom for the displacement. With a modest increase in the number of degrees of freedom (24 for the stress), we obtain a conforming rectangular element for linear elasticity in three dimensions. Moreover, unlike the conforming plane rectangular or simplicial elements, this element does not involve any vertex degrees of freedom. Second, we remark that further low order elements can be constructed by approximating the displacement with rigid body motions. This results in a pair of conforming elements with 72 degrees of freedom for the stress and 6 degrees of freedom for the displacement.

Gerard Awanou

We present two numerical methods for the fully nonlinear elliptic Monge-Ampere equation. The first is a pseudo transient continuation method and the second is a pure pseudo time marching method. The methods are proven to converge to a strictly convex solution of a natural discrete variational formulation with $C^1$ conforming approximations. The assumption of existence of a strictly convex solution to the discrete problem is proven for smooth solutions of the continuous problem and supported by numerical evidence for non smooth solutions.

Gerard Awanou

We present new rectangular mixed finite elements for linear elasticity. The approach is based on a modification of the Hellinger-Reissner functional in which the symmetry of the stress field is enforced weakly through the introduction of a Lagrange multiplier. The elements are analogues of the lowest order elements described in Arnold, Falk and Winther [ Mixed finite element methods for linear elasticity with weakly imposed symmetry. Mathematics of Computation 76 (2007), pp. 1699--1723]. Piecewise constants are used to approximate the displacement and the rotation. The first order BDM elements are used to approximate each row of the stress field.

Gerard Awanou

We analyze the convergence of an iterative method for solving the nonlinear system resulting from a natural discretization of the Monge-Ampère equation with $C^1$ conforming approximations. We make the assumption, supported by numerical experiments for the two dimensional problem, that the discrete problem has a convex solution. The method we analyze is the discrete version of Newton's method in the vanishing moment methodology. Numerical experiments are given in the framework of the spline element method.

Gerard Awanou

On a domain of the n-dimensional Euclidean space, and for an integer k=1,...,n, the k-Hessian equations are fully nonlinear elliptic equations for k >1 and consist of the Poisson equation for k=1 and the Monge-Ampere equation for k=n. We analyze for smooth non degenerate solutions a 9-point finite difference scheme. We prove that the discrete scheme has a locally unique solution with a quadratic convergence rate. In addition we propose new iterative methods which are numerically shown to work for non smooth solutions. A connection of the latter with a popular Gauss-Seidel method for the Monge-Ampere equation is established and new Gauss-Seidel type iterative methods for 2-Hessian equations are introduced.

Gerard Awanou

We prove the convergence of a hybrid discretization to the viscosity solution of the elliptic Monge-Ampere equation. The hybrid discretization uses a standard finite difference discretization in parts of the computational domain where the solution is expected to be smooth and a monotone scheme elsewhere. A motivation for the hybrid discretization is the lack of an appropriate Newton solver for the standard finite difference discretization on the whole domain.

Gerard Awanou, Hengguang Li, Eric Malitz

The purpose of this paper is to analyze an efficient method for the solution of the nonlinear system resulting from the discretization of the elliptic Monge-Ampère equation by a $C^0$ interior penalty method with Lagrange finite elements. We consider the two-grid method for nonlinear equations which consists in solving the discrete nonlinear system on a coarse mesh and using that solution as initial guess for one iteration of Newton's method on a finer mesh. Thus both steps are inexpensive. We give quasi-optimal $W^{1,\infty}$ error estimates for the discretization and estimate the difference between the interior penalty solution and the two-grid numerical solution. Numerical experiments confirm the computational efficiency of the approach compared to Newton's method on the fine mesh.

Gerard Awanou, Leopold Matamba Messi

We present a numerical method for solving the Monge-Ampere equation based on the characterization of the solution of the Dirichlet problem as the minimizer of a convex functional of the gradient and under convexity and nonlinear constraints. When the equation is discretized with a certain monotone scheme, we prove that the unique minimizer of the discrete problem solves the finite difference equation. For the numerical results we use both the standard finite difference discretization and the monotone scheme. Results with standard tests confirm that the numerical approximations converge to the Aleksandrov solution.

Gerard Awanou

We prove a convergence result for a natural discretization of the Dirichlet problem of the elliptic Monge-Ampere equation using finite dimensional spaces of piecewise polynomial C0 or C1 functions. Standard discretizations of the type considered in this paper have been previous analyzed in the case the equation has a smooth solution and numerous numerical evidence of convergence were given in the case of non smooth solutions. Our convergence result is valid for non smooth solutions, is given in the setting of Aleksandrov solutions, and consists in discretizing the equation in a subdomain with the boundary data used as an approximation of the solution in the remaining part of the domain. Our result gives a theoretical validation for the use of a non monotone finite element method for the Monge-Ampère equation.

Gerard Awanou

We propose a new variational formulation of the elliptic Monge-Ampere equation and show how classical Lagrange elements can be used for the numerical resolution of classical solutions of the equation. Error estimates are given for Lagrange elements of degree d >= 2 in dimensions 2 and 3. No jump term is used in the variational formulation. We propose to solve the discrete nonlinear system of equations by a time marching method and numerical evidence is given which indicates that one approximates weak solutions in two dimensions.

Gerard Awanou

Given an orthogonal lattice with mesh length h on a bounded convex domain, we propose to approximate the Aleksandrov solution of the Monge-Ampere equation by regularizing the data and discretizing the equation in a subdomain using the standard finite difference method. The Dirichlet data is used to approximate the solution in the remaining part of the domain. We prove the uniform convergence on compact subsets of the solution of the discrete problems to an approximate problem on the subdomain. The result explains the behavior of methods based on the standard finite difference method and designed to numerically converge to non-smooth solutions. We propose an algorithm which for smooth solutions appears faster than the popular Newton's method with a high accuracy for non smooth solutions. The convergence of the algorithm is independent of how close to the numerical solution the initial guess is, upon rescaling the equation and given a user's measure of the closeness of an initial guess.

Gerard Awanou

We prove a convergence result for a mixed finite element method for the Monge-Ampere equation to its weak solution in the sense of Aleksandrov. The unknowns in the formulation are the scalar variable and the Hessian matrix.

Gerard Awanou, Romeo Awi

We present a technique for proving convergence to the Aleksandrov solution of the Monge-Ampere equation of a stable and consistent finite difference scheme. We also require a notion of discrete convexity with a stability property and a local equicontinuity property for bounded sequences.

Douglas N. Arnold, Gerard Awanou, Ragnar Winther

We construct finite element subspaces of the space of symmetric tensors with square-integrable divergence on a three-dimensional domain. These spaces can be used to approximate the stress field in the classical Hellinger--Reissner mixed formulation of the elasticty equations, when standard discontinous finite element spaces are used to approximate the displacement field. These finite element spaces are defined with respect to an arbitrary simplicial triangulation of the domain, and there is one for each positive value of the polynomial degree used for the displacements. For each degree, these provide a stable finite element discretization. The construction of the spaces is closely tied to discretizations of the elasticity complex, and can be viewed as the three-dimensional analogue of the triangular element family for plane elasticity previously proposed by Arnold and Winther.