A high-order enrichment strategy for the finite cell method

Thanks to the application of the immersed boundary approach in the finite cell method, the mesh can be defined independently from the geometry. Although this leads to a significant simplification of the mesh generation, it might cause difficulties in the solution. One of the possible difficulties will occur if the exact solution of the underlying problem exhibits a kink inside an element, for instance at material interfaces. In such a case, the solution turns out less smooth – and the convergence rate is deteriorated if no further measures are taken into account. In this paper, we explore a remedy by considering the partition of unity method. The proposed approach allows to define enrichment functions with the help of a high-order implicit representation of the material interface. (© 2015 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)