Investigation of practical high repetition rate copper vapour lasers with external heating

The characteristics of high repetition rate CVL devices incorporating passive external heating have been investigated. Pre-heating of the CVL plasma tube using external heating has been shown to significantly reduce CVL warm-up time, while supplementary heating of the CVL plasma tube using external heating allows efficient CVL operation with reduced discharge power input without any degradation in output power.     

The influence and selection of subspaces for a posteriori error estimators

Summary. The element residual method for a posteriori error estimation is analyzed for degree finite element approximation on quadrilateral elements. The influence of the choice of subspace used to solve the element residual problem is studied. It is shown that the resulting estimators will be consistent (or asymptotically exact) for all if and only if the mesh is parallel. Moreover, even if the mesh consists of rectangles, then the estimators can be inconsistent when . The results provide concrete guidelines for the selection of a posteriori error estimators and establish the limits of their performance. In particular, the use of the element residual method for high orders of approximation (such as those arising in the - version finite element method) is vindicated. The mechanism behind the rather poor performance of the estimators is traced back to the basic formulation of the residual problem. The investigations reveal a deficiency in the formulation, leading, as it does, to spurious modes in the true solution of the residual problem. The recommended choice of subspaces may be viewed as being sufficient to guarantee that the spurious modes are filtered out from the approximate solution while at the same time retaining a sufficient degree of approximation to represent the true modes. Received February 27, 1995 / Revised version received June 7, 1995     

Analysis of Iterative Sub-structuring Techniques for Boundary Element Approximation of the Hypersingular Operator in Three Dimensions

The article deals with the analysis of Additive Schwarz preconditioners for the h -version of the boundary element method for the hypersingular integral equation on surfaces in three dimensions. The first preconditioner consists of decomposing into local spaces associated with the subdomain interiors, supplemented with a wirebasket space associated with the subdomain interfaces. The wirebasket correction only involves the inversion of a diagonal matrix, while the interior correction consists of inverting the sub-blocks of the stiffness matrix corresponding to the interior degrees of freedom on each subdomain. It is shown that the condition number of the preconditioned system grows at most as max K H m 1 (1 + log H / h K ) 2 where H is the size of the quasi-uniform subdomains and h K is the size of the elements in subdomain K . A second preconditioner is given that incorporates a coarse space associated with the subdomains. This improves the robustness of the method with respect to the number of subdomains: theoretical analysis shows that growth of the condition number of the preconditioned system is now bounded by max K (1 + log H / h K ) 2 .