Mass lumping of stable generalized finite element methods for parabolic interface problems

Abstract

Stable generalized finite element method (SGFEM) for interface problem is based on simple mesh independent of interface curves and possesses merits of optimal convergence rates, conditioning of same order as that of finite element method (FEM), robustness, and freedom from any penalty parameters or stability schemes. This paper investigates mass lumping of SGFEM for parabolic interface problems. The mass lumping is important for computational reduction and maximum principle preserving. The difficulty in the mass lumping of conventional generalized FEM (GFEM) and SGFEM consists in their incorporation of extra enriched functions. The existing mass lumping methods of GFEM cannot work properly due to features of SGFEM that enriched shape functions vanish on mesh nodes, and the nodes are enriched partially rather than totally. In this study, we propose two mass lumping schemes for the SGFEM. The first one is to only lump the FEM part, and enriched parts are kept fixed. This scheme enables us to execute a rigorous optimal convergence analysis. It is noted that a theoretical analysis on the mass lumping of GFEM has not been available yet in the GFEM field. The second scheme is to further compress the enriched part and intersection part of mass matrix separately. The lumped mass matrix is almost diagonal, and there is only a line of nonzero entries in the intersection part of mass matrix. Numerical experiments indicate that two schemes both produce the optimal convergence rates; their errors are almost the same as those of SGFEM without using the mass lumping.