A three-grid high-order immersed finite element method for the analysis of CAD models

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-order immersed finite element method utilizing three adaptive structured grids for accurate and efficient analysis of complex CAD models, overcoming limitations of boundary-fitted meshes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel three-grid approach combining geometry, finite element, and quadrature grids, leveraging open-source libraries for robustness and parallel efficiency.

Findings

Successfully solved Poisson equations on complex CAD models with tens of millions of degrees of freedom.

Achieved high accuracy and robustness in finite element analysis of complex geometries.

Demonstrated scalability and efficiency of the method in parallel computing environments.

Abstract

The automated finite element analysis of complex CAD models using boundary-fitted meshes is rife with difficulties. Immersed finite element methods are intrinsically more robust but usually less accurate. In this work, we introduce an efficient, robust, high-order immersed finite element method for complex CAD models. Our approach relies on three adaptive structured grids: a geometry grid for representing the implicit geometry, a finite element grid for discretising physical fields and a quadrature grid for evaluating the finite element integrals. The geometry grid is a sparse VDB (Volumetric Dynamic B+ tree) grid that is highly refined close to physical domain boundaries. The finite element grid consists of a forest of octree grids distributed over several processors, and the quadrature grid in each finite element cell is an octree grid constructed in a bottom-up fashion. We discretise physical fields on the finite element grid using high-order Lagrange basis functions. The resolution of the quadrature grid ensures that finite element integrals are evaluated with sufficient accuracy and that any sub-grid geometric features, like small holes or corners, are resolved up to a desired resolution. The conceptual simplicity and modularity of our approach make it possible to reuse open-source libraries, i.e. openVDB and p4est for implementing the geometry and finite element grids, respectively, and BDDCML for iteratively solving the discrete systems of equations in parallel using domain decomposition. We demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed approach by solving the Poisson equation on domains given by complex CAD models and discretised with tens of millions of degrees of freedom.