A partition of unity approach to Spectral Elements

The spectral cell method has been shown an efficient tool for performing dynamic analyses over complex domains. Its good performance can be attributed to the combination of the spectral element method with mesh-​independent geometrical descriptions and the adoption of customized mass lumping procedures for elements intersected by a boundary, which enable it to exploit highly efficient, explicit solvers.
✨ In this work, led by Sergio Nicoli (doctoral candidate at the Chair of Structural Mechanics and Monitoring at ETH Zurich), we introduce the use of partition-​of-unity enrichment functions, so that additional domain features, such as cracks or material interfaces, can be seamlessly added to the modeling process. For handling enriched elements, we propose a novel mass lumping method for enriched spectral elements in the form of a customized moment-​fitting procedure and study its accuracy and stability.
👉 Find out more in volume 13 of Applied Sciences:
www.mdpi.com/2...
This research was conducted as part of the project “Fusion of Models and Data for Enriched Evaluation of Structural Health” (2019/01/Y/ST8/00060) financed by the National Science Center (Poland) and the Swiss National Science Foundation. It forms a collaboration with the Institute of Fluid-Flow Machinery of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Pawel Kudela).