Divergence-conforming discretization for Stokes problem on locally refined meshes using LR B-splines

Abstract

To solve the incompressible flow problems using isogeometric analysis, the div-compatible spline spaces were originally introduced by Buffa et al. (2011), and later developed by Evans (2011). In this paper, we extend the div-compatible spline spaces with local refinement capability using Locally Refined (LR) B-splines over rectangular domains. We argue that the spline spaces generated on locally refined meshes will satisfy compatibility provided they span the entire function spaces as governed by Mourrain (2014) dimension formula. We will in this work use the structured refined LR B-splines as introduced by Johannessen et al. (2014). Further, we consider these div-compatible LR B-spline spaces to approximate the velocity and pressure fields in mixed discretization for Stokes problem and a set of standard benchmark tests are performed to show the stability, efficiency and the conservation properties of the discrete velocity fields in adaptive isogeometric analysis.