kFEM: Adaptive meshfree finite‐element methods using local kernels on arbitrary subdomains

Abstract

Summary We propose a novel finite‐element method for polygonal meshes. The resulting scheme is hp‐adaptive, where h and p are a measure of, respectively, the size and the number of degrees of freedom of each polygon. Moreover, it is locally meshfree, since it is possible to arbitrarily choose the locations of the degrees of freedom inside each polygon. Our construction is based on nodal kernel functions, whose support consists of all polygons that contain a given node. This ensures a significantly higher sparsity compared to standard meshfree approximations. In this work, we choose axis‐aligned quadrilaterals as polygonal primitives and maximum entropy approximants as kernels. However, any other convex approximation scheme and convex polygons can be employed. We study the optimal placement of nodes for regular elements, ie, those that are not intersected by the boundary, and propose a method to generate a suitable mesh. Finally, we show via numerical experiments that the proposed approach provides good accuracy without undermining the sparsity of the resulting matrices.