Multiscale finite element for problems with highly oscillatory coefficients

Summary. In this paper, we study a multiscale finite element method for solving a class of elliptic problems with finite number of well separated scales. The method is designed to efficiently capture the large scale behavior of the solution without resolving all small scale features. This is accomplished by constructing the multiscale finite element base functions that are adaptive to the local property of the differential operator. The construction of the base functions is fully decoupled from element to element; thus the method is perfectly parallel and is naturally adapted to massively parallel computers. We present the convergence analysis of the method along with the results of our numerical experiments. Some generalizations of the multiscale finite element method are also discussed. Received April 17, 1998 / Revised version received March 25, 2000 / Published online June 7, 2001