Almost-C1 splines: Biquadratic splines on unstructured quadrilateral meshes and their application to fourth order problems

Thomas Takacs, Deepesh Toshniwal*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)
65 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Isogeometric Analysis generalizes classical finite element analysis and intends to integrate it with the field of Computer-Aided Design. A central problem in achieving this objective is the reconstruction of analysis-suitable models from Computer-Aided Design models, which is in general a non-trivial and time-consuming task. In this article, we present a novel spline construction, that enables model reconstruction as well as simulation of high-order PDEs on the reconstructed models. The proposed almost-C1 splines are biquadratic splines on fully unstructured quadrilateral meshes (without restrictions on placements or number of extraordinary vertices). They are C1 smooth at all regular and extraordinary vertices. Moreover, they are C1 smooth across all edges between regular vertices and C0 smooth across all edges that are adjacent to an extraordinary vertex. The splines thus form H2-nonconforming analysis-suitable discretization spaces. This is the lowest-degree unstructured spline construction that can be used to solve fourth-order problems. The associated spline basis is non-singular and has several B-spline-like properties (e.g., partition of unity, non-negativity, local support), the almost-C1 splines are described in an explicit Bézier-extraction-based framework that can be easily implemented. Numerical tests suggest that the basis is well-conditioned and exhibits optimal approximation behaviour.

Original languageEnglish
Article number115640
Number of pages34
JournalComputer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering
Volume403
Issue numberPart A
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

Keywords

  • almost-C splines
  • Analysis-suitable splines
  • Isogeometric analysis
  • Optimal approximation
  • Unstructured quadrilateral meshes

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