Convergence analysis of sectional methods for solving aggregation population balance equations: The fixed pivot technique

In this paper, we introduce the convergence analysis of the fixed pivot technique given by S. Kumar and Ramkrishna (1996) [28] for the nonlinear aggregation population balance equations which are of substantial interest in many areas of science: colloid chemistry, aerosol physics, astrophysics, polymer science, oil recovery dynamics, and mathematical biology. In particular, we investigate the convergence for five different types of uniform and non-uniform meshes which turns out that the fixed pivot technique is second order convergent on a uniform and non-uniform smooth meshes. Moreover, it yields first order convergence on a locally uniform mesh. Finally, the analysis exhibits that the method does not converge on an oscillatory and non-uniform random meshes. Mathematical results of the convergence analysis are also demonstrated numerically.     

Planar mesh refinement cannot be both local and regular

We show that two desirable properties for planar mesh refinement techniques are incompatible. Mesh refinement is a common technique for adaptive error control in generating unstructured planar triangular meshes for piecewise polynomial representations of data. Local refinements are modifications of the mesh that involve a fixed maximum amount of computation, independent of the number of triangles in the mesh. Regular meshes are meshes for which every interior vertex has degree 6. At least for some simple model meshing problems, optimal meshes are known to be regular, hence it would be desirable to have a refinement technique that, if applied to a regular mesh, produced a larger regular mesh. We call such a technique a regular refinement. In this paper, we prove that no refinement technique can be both local and regular. Our results also have implications for non-local refinement techniques such as Delaunay insertion or Rivara's refinement. Received August 1, 1996 / Revised version received February 28, 1997     

A nine-point scheme with explicit weights for diffusion equations on distorted meshes

In this paper, for the structured quadrilateral mesh we derive a nine-point difference scheme which has five cell-centered unknowns and four vertex unknowns. The vertex unknowns are treated as intermediate ones and are expressed as a linear combination of the neighboring cell-centered unknowns, which reduces the scheme to a cell-centered one with a local stencil involving nine cell-centered unknowns. The coefficients in the linear combination are known as the weights and two types of new weights are proposed. These new weights are neither discontinuity dependent nor mesh topology dependent, have explicit expressions, can reduce to the one-dimensional harmonic-average weights on the nonuniform rectangular meshes, and moreover, are easily extended to the unstructured polygonal meshes and non-matching meshes. Both the derivation of the nine-point scheme and that of new weights satisfy the linearity preserving criterion. Numerical experiments show that, with these new weights, the nine-point difference scheme and its simple extension have a nearly second order accuracy on many highly distorted meshes, including structured quadrilateral meshes, unstructured polygonal meshes and non-matching meshes.     

Convergence analysis of sectional methods for solving breakage population balance equations-I: the fixed pivot technique

In this work we study the convergence of the fixed pivot techniques (Kumar and Ramkrishna Chem. Eng. Sci. 51, 1311–1332, 1996) for breakage problems. In particular, the convergence is investigated on four different types of uniform and non-uniform meshes. It is shown that the fixed pivot technique is second order convergent on a uniform and non-uniform smooth meshes. Furthermore, it gives first order convergence on a locally uniform mesh. Finally the analysis shows that the method does not converge on a non-uniform random mesh. The mathematical results of convergence analysis are also validated numerically.     

Quading triangular meshes with certain topological constraints

In computer graphics and geometric modeling, shapes are often represented by triangular meshes (also called 3D meshes or manifold triangulations). The quadrangulation of a triangular mesh has wide applications. In this paper, we present a novel method of quading a closed orientable triangular mesh into a quasi-regular quadrangulation, i.e., a quadrangulation that only contains vertices of degree four or five. The quasi-regular quadrangulation produced by our method also has the property that the number of quads of the quadrangulation is the smallest among all the quasi-regular quadrangulations. In addition, by constructing the so-called orthogonal system of cycles our method is more effective to control the quality of the quadrangulation.     

Quading triangular meshes with certain topological constraints

In computer graphics and geometric modeling, shapes are often represented by triangular meshes (also called 3D meshes or manifold triangulations). The quadrangulation of a triangular mesh has wide applications. In this paper, we present a novel method of quading a closed orientable triangular mesh into a quasi-regular quadrangulation, i.e., a quadrangulation that only contains vertices of degree four or five. The quasi-regular quadrangulation produced by our method also has the property that the number of quads of the quadrangulation is the smallest among all the quasi-regular quadrangulations. In addition, by constructing the so-called orthogonal system of cycles our method is more effective to control the quality of the quadrangulation.     

Small perturbations of polynomial meshes

We show that the property of being a (weakly) admissible mesh for multivariate polynomials is preserved by small perturbations on real and complex Markov compacts. Applications are given to smooth transformations of polynomial meshes and to polynomial interpolation.     

On the adjacencies of triangular meshes based on skeleton-regular partitions

For any 2D triangulation τ, the 1-skeleton mesh of τ is the wireframe mesh defined by the edges of τ, while that for any 3D triangulation τ, the 1-skeleton and the 2-skeleton meshes, respectively, correspond to the wireframe mesh formed by the edges of τ and the “surface” mesh defined by the triangular faces of τ. A skeleton-regular partition of a triangle or a tetrahedra, is a partition that globally applied over each element of a conforming mesh (where the intersection of adjacent elements is a vertex or a common face, or a common edge) produce both a refined conforming mesh and refined and conforming skeleton meshes. Such a partition divides all the edges (and all the faces) of an individual element in the same number of edges (faces). We prove that sequences of meshes constructed by applying a skeleton-regular partition over each element of the preceding mesh have an associated set of difference equations which relate the number of elements, faces, edges and vertices of the nth and (n−1)th meshes. By using these constitutive difference equations we prove that asymptotically the average number of adjacencies over these meshes (number of triangles by node and number of tetrahedra by vertex) is constant when n goes to infinity. We relate these results with the non-degeneracy properties of longest-edge based partitions in 2D and include empirical results which support the conjecture that analogous results hold in 3D.     

A Study on the Conditioning of Finite Element Equations with Arbitrary Anisotropic Meshes via a Density Function Approach

The linear finite element approximation of a general linear diffusion problem with arbitrary anisotropic meshes is considered. The conditioning of the resultant stiffness matrix and the Jacobi preconditioned stiffness matrix is investigated using a density function approach proposed by Fried in 1973. It is shown that the approach can be made mathematically rigorous for general domains and used to develop bounds on the smallest eigenvalue and the condition number that are sharper than existing estimates in one and two dimensions and comparable in three and higher dimensions. The new results reveal that the mesh concentration near the boundary has less influence on the condition number than the mesh concentration in the interior of the domain. This is especially true for the Jacobi preconditioned system where the former has little or almost no influence on the condition number. Numerical examples are presented.     

A posteriori error estimation for convection dominated problems on anisotropic meshes

A singularly perturbed convection–diffusion problem in two and three space dimensions is discretized using the streamline upwind Petrov Galerkin (SUPG) variant of the finite element method. The dominant convection frequently gives rise to solutions with layers; hence anisotropic finite elements can be applied advantageously. The main focus is on a posteriori energy norm error estimation that is robust in the perturbation parameter and with respect to the mesh anisotropy. A residual error estimator and a local problem error estimator are proposed and investigated. The analysis reveals that the upper error bound depends on the alignment of the anisotropies of the mesh and of the solution. Hence reliable error estimation is possible for suitable anisotropic meshes. The lower error bound depends on the problem data via a local mesh Peclet number. Thus efficient error estimation is achieved for small mesh Peclet numbers. Altogether, error estimation approaches for isotropic meshes are successfully extended to anisotropic elements. Several numerical experiments support the analysis. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The influence of boundary approximation on transfer operators between non-nested meshes

Finite element methods with non-matching meshes can offer increased flexibility in many applications. Although the specific reasons for the use of non-matching meshes are apparently diverse, the common difficulty in all these numerical methods is the transfer of finite element approximation associated with one mesh to finite element approximation associated with another mesh. This paper complements previous quantitative studies of transfer operators between finite element spaces associated with unrelated meshes (T. Dickopf, R. Krause, Evaluating local approximations of the L²-orthogonal projection between non-nested finite element spaces, Tech. Rep. 2012-01, Institute of Computational Science, Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012). We study the important use case in which functions are mapped between a regular background mesh and an unstructured mesh of a complex geometry. Here, the former does not approximate the latter. (© 2013 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

自适应间断Galerkin 有限元的多水平方法

本文讨论在自适应网格上间断Galerkin 有限元离散系统的局部多水平算法. 对于光滑系数和间断系数情形, 利用Schwarz 理论分析了算法的收敛性. 理论和数值试验均说明算法的收敛率与网格层数以及网格尺寸无关. 对强间断系数情形算法是拟最优的, 即收敛率仅与网格层数有关.     

Absorbing Interface Conditions for the Simulation of Wave Propagation on Non-Uniform Meshes

We proposed absorbing interface conditions for the simulation of linear wave propagation on non-uniform meshes. Based on the superposition principle of second-order linear wave equations, we decompose the interface condition problem into two subproblems around the interface: for the first one the conventional artificial absorbing boundary conditions is applied, while for the second one, the local analytic solutions can be derived. The proposed interface conditions permit a two-way transmission of low-frequency waves across mesh interfaces which can be supported by both coarse and fine meshes, and perform a one-way absorption of high-frequency waves which can only be supported by fine meshes when they travel from fine mesh regions to coarse ones. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed absorbing interface conditions.     

Parallel anisotropic mesh adaptivity with dynamic load balancing for cardiac electrophysiology

Simulations in cardiac electrophysiology generally use very fine meshes and small time steps to resolve highly localized wavefronts. This expense motivates the use of mesh adaptivity, which has been demonstrated to reduce the overall computational load. However, even with mesh adaptivity performing such simulations on a single processor is infeasible. Therefore, the adaptivity algorithm must be parallelised. Rather than modifying the sequential adaptive algorithm, the parallel mesh adaptivity method introduced in this paper focuses on dynamic load balancing in response to the local refinement and coarsening of the mesh. In essence, the mesh partition boundary is perturbed away from mesh regions of high relative error, while also balancing the computational load across processes. The parallel scaling of the method when applied to physiologically realistic heart meshes is shown to be good as long as there are enough mesh nodes to distribute over the available parallel processes. It is shown that the new method is dominated by the cost of the sequential adaptive mesh procedure and that the parallel overhead of inter-process data migration represents only a small fraction of the overall cost.     

Optimal algebraic multilevel preconditioning for local refinement along a line

The application of some recently proposed algebraic multilevel methods for the solution of two-dimensional finite element problems on nonuniform meshes is studied. The locally refined meshes are created by the newest vertex mesh refinement method. After the introduction of this refinement technique it is shown that, by combining levels of refinement, a preconditioner of optimal order can be constructed for the case of local refinement along a line. Its relative condition number is accurately estimated. Numerical tests demonstrating the performance of the proposed preconditioners will be reported in a forthcoming paper.     

Further mathematical properties of Cayley digraphs applied to hexagonal and honeycomb meshes

In this paper, we extend known relationships between Cayley digraphs and their subgraphs and coset graphs with respect to subgroups to obtain a number of general results on homomorphism between them. Intuitively, our results correspond to synthesizing alternative, more economical, interconnection networks by reducing the number of dimensions and/or link density of existing networks via mapping and pruning. We discuss applications of these results to well-known and useful interconnection networks such as hexagonal and honeycomb meshes, including the derivation of provably correct shortest-path routing algorithms for such networks.     

Pollution-error in the h-version of the finite-element method and the local quality of a-posteriori error estimators

In this paper we study the pollution-error in the h-version of the finite element method and its effect on the local quality of a-posteriori error estimators. We show that the pollution-effect in an interior subdomain depends on the relationship between the mesh inside and outside the subdomain and the smoothness of the exact solution. We also demonstrate that it is possible to guarantee the quality of local error estimators in any mesh-patch in the interior of a finite-element mesh by employing meshes which are sufficiently refined outside the patch.     

Preconditioning analysis of the one dimensional incremental unknowns method on nonuniform meshes

The condition number of the incremental unknowns matrix on nonuniform meshes associated to the elliptic problem is analyzed. Comparing to the usual nodal unknowns matrix, the condition number of the incremental unknowns matrix is reduced significantly even if the meshes are nonuniform. Furthermore, if a diagonal scaling is used, the condition number of the preconditioned incremental unknowns matrix comes out to be O(1). Numerical experiments are performed respectively on Shishkin mesh and Chebyshev mesh. Computational results with respect to the two particular nonuniform meshes confirm our theoretical analysis.     

Adaptive Surface Reconstruction Based on Tensor Product Algebraic Splines

Surface reconstruction from unorganized data points is a challenging problem in Computer Aided Design and Geometric Modeling. In this paper, we extend the mathematical model proposed by Juttler and Felis (Adv. Comput. Math., 17 (2002), pp. 135-152) based on tensor product algebraic spline surfaces from fixed meshes to adaptive meshes. We start with a tensor product algebraic B-spline surface defined on an initial mesh to fit the given data based on an optimization approach. By measuring the fitting errors over each cell of the mesh, we recursively insert new knots in cells over which the errors are larger than some given threshold, and construct a new algebraic spline surface to better fit the given data locally. The algorithm terminates when the error over each cell is less than the threshold. We provide some examples to demonstrate our algorithm and compare it with Jiittler's method. Examples suggest that our method is effective and is able to produce reconstruction surfaces of high quality.AMS subject classifications: 65D17     

An adaptive finite element algorithm with reliable and efficient error control for linear parabolic problems

An efficient and reliable a posteriori error estimate is derived for linear parabolic equations which does not depend on any regularity assumption on the underlying elliptic operator. An adaptive algorithm with variable time-step sizes and space meshes is proposed and studied which, at each time step, delays the mesh coarsening until the final iteration of the adaptive procedure, allowing only mesh and time-step size refinements before. It is proved that at each time step the adaptive algorithm is able to reduce the error indicators (and thus the error) below any given tolerance within a finite number of iteration steps. The key ingredient in the analysis is a new coarsening strategy. Numerical results are presented to show the competitive behavior of the proposed adaptive algorithm.