SUMMARYWe discuss recent advances on robust unfitted finite element methods on cut meshes. These methods are designed to facilitate computations on complex geometries obtained, for example, from computer-aided design or image data from applied sciences. Both the treatment of boundaries and interfaces and the discretization of PDEs on surfaces are discussed and illustrated numerically.

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We develop a Nitsche fictitious domain method for the Stokes problem starting from a stabilized Galerkin finite element method with low order elements for both the velocity and the pressure. By introducing additional penalty terms for the jumps in the normal velocity and pressure gradients in the vicinity of the boundary, we show that the method is inf-sup stable. As a consequence, optimal order a priori error estimates are established. Moreover, the condition number of the resulting stiffness matrix is shown to be bounded independently of the location of the boundary. We discuss a general, flexible and freely available implementation of the method in three spatial dimensions and present numerical examples supporting the theoretical results.

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