$\phi$-FEM: an efficient simulation tool using simple meshes for problems in structure mechanics and heat transfer

TL;DR

This paper extends the $\,\phi$-FEM unfitted finite element method to complex problems in computational mechanics, demonstrating its accuracy and efficiency in handling geometrically complex domains without mesh fitting.

Contribution

It adapts and validates the $\,\phi$-FEM approach for advanced mechanics problems, including elasticity and heat transfer, showing its practical applicability beyond simple cases.

Findings

$\,\phi$-FEM achieves optimal convergence in complex mechanics problems.

The method outperforms standard FEM in accuracy and computational efficiency.

Numerical tests confirm the method's robustness and versatility.

Abstract

One of the major issues in the computational mechanics is to take into account the geometrical complexity. To overcome this difficulty and to avoid the expensive mesh generation, geometrically unfitted methods, i.e. the numerical methods using the simple computational meshes that do not fit the boundary of the domain, and/or the internal interfaces, have been widely developed. In the present work, we investigate the performances of an unfitted method called $\phi$-FEM that converges optimally and uses classical finite element spaces so that it can be easily implemented using general FEM libraries. The main idea is to take into account the geometry thanks to a level set function describing the boundary or the interface. Up to now, the $\phi$-FEM approach has been proposed, tested and substantiated mathematically only in some simplest settings: Poisson equation with Dirichlet/Neumann/Robin boundary conditions. Our goal here is to demonstrate its applicability to some more sophisticated governing equations arising in the computational mechanics. We consider the linear elasticity equations accompanied by either pure Dirichlet boundary conditions or by the mixed ones (Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions co-existing on parts of the boundary), an interface problem (linear elasticity with material coefficients abruptly changing over an internal interface), a model of elastic structures with cracks, and finally the heat equation. In all these settings, we derive an appropriate variant of $\phi$-FEM and then illustrate it by numerical tests on manufactured solutions. We also compare the accuracy and efficiency of $\phi$-FEM with those of the standard fitted FEM on the meshes of similar size, revealing the substantial gains that can be achieved by $\phi$-FEM in both the accuracy and the computational time.