Second-order elliptic PDE with discontinuous boundary data

Houston, Paul; Wihler, Thomas P.

Second-order elliptic PDE with discontinuous boundary data

Houston, Paul; Wihler, Thomas P.

Authors

Professor PAUL HOUSTON PAUL.HOUSTON@NOTTINGHAM.AC.UK
Head of School (Professor of Computational and Applied Maths)

Thomas P. Wihler

Abstract

We shall consider the weak formulation of a linear elliptic model problem with discontinuous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Since such problems are typically not well-defined in the standard H^1-H^1 setting, we will introduce a suitable saddle point formulation in terms of weighted Sobolev spaces. Furthermore, we will discuss the numerical solution of such problems. Specifically, we employ an hp-discontinuous Galerkin method and derive an L^2-norm a posteriori error estimate. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed error indicator in both the h- and hp-version setting. Indeed, in the latter case exponential convergence of the error is attained as the mesh is adaptively refined.