Category: News

Théophile Chaumont-Frelet: Thursday 22 October at 11:00, A415, Inria Paris. I will present of a novel a posteriori estimator for finite element discretizations of Maxwell’s equations. The construction hinges on a modification of the flux equilibration technique, called quasi-equilibration. The resulting estimator is inexpensive to compute and polynomial-degree-robust, which means that the reliability and efficiency constants are independent of the discretization order. I will first describe the standard flux equilibration technique for the simpler case of Poisson’s problem, and explain why it is hard to directly apply this idea to Maxwell’s equations. Then, I will present in detail the derivation of the proposed estimator through the quasi-equilibration procedure. Numerical examples highlighting the key features of the estimator will be presented, and followed by concluding remarks.

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Florent Hédin: Thursday 15 October at 11:00, Gilles Kahn 1, Inria Paris. We are interested in efficient numerical methods for solving flow in large scale fractured networks. Fractures are ubiquitous in the subsurface. Flow in fractured rocks are of interest for many applications (water resources, geothermal applications, oil/gas extraction, nuclear waste disposal). The networks are modeled as Discrete Fractures Networks (DFN). The main challenges of such flow simulations are the uncertainty regarding the geometry and properties of the subsurface, the observed wide range of fractures length (from centimeters to kilometers) and the number of fractures (from thousands to millions of fractures). In natural rocks, flow is highly channelled, which motivates to mesh finely the fractures that carry most of the flow, and coarsely the remaining fractures. But independent triangular mesh generation from one fracture to another yields non matching triangles at the intersections between fractures. Mortar methods have been developed in the past years to deal with non matching grids. In this presentation, we propose an alternative based on the recent HHO method which naturally handles general meshes (polygons/polyhedral) and face polynomials of order k ≥ 0. Combined with refining/coarsening strategies, we will show how the HHO method allows to save computational time in DFN flow simulations.

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Amina Benaceur: Wednesday 5 December at 11:00 am, A315 Inria Paris. This thesis introduces three new developments of the reduced basis method (RB) and the empirical interpolation method (EIM) for nonlinear problems. The first contribution is a new methodology, the Progressive RB-EIM (PREIM) which aims at reducing the cost of the phase during which the reduced model is constructed without compromising the accuracy of the final RB approximation. The idea is to gradually enrich the EIM approximation and the RB space, in contrast to the standard approach where both constructions are separate. The second contribution is related to the RB for variational inequalities with nonlinear constraints. We employ an RB-EIM combination to treat the nonlinear constraint. Also, we build a reduced basis for the Lagrange multipliers via a hierarchical algorithm that preserves the non-negativity of the basis vectors. We apply this strategy to elastic frictionless contact for non-matching meshes. Finally, the third contribution focuses on model reduction with data assimilation. A dedicated method has been introduced in the literature so as to combine numerical models with experimental measurements. We extend the method to a time-dependent framework using a POD-greedy algorithm in order to build accurate reduced spaces for all the time steps. Besides, we devise a new algorithm that produces better reduced spaces while minimizing the number of measurements required for the final reduced problem.

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Zhaonan Dong: Wednesday 9 January at 11 am, A415 Inria Paris. PDE models are often characterised by local features such as solution singularities/layers and domains with complicated boundaries. These special features make the design of accurate numerical solutions challenging, or require huge amount of computational resources. One way of achieving complexity reduction of the numerical solution for such PDE models is to design novel numerical methods which support general meshes consisting of polygonal/polyhedral elements, such that local features of the model can be resolved in efficiently by adaptive choices of such general meshes. In this talk, we will review the recently developed hp-version symmetric interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (dG) finite element method for the numerical approximation of PDEs on general computational meshes consisting of polygonal/polyhedral (polytopic) elements. The key feature of the proposed dG method is that the stability and hp-version a-priori error bound are derived based on the specific choice of the interior penalty parameters which allows for edges/faces degeneration. Moreover, under certain practical mesh assumptions, the proposed dG method was proven to be available to incorporate very general polygonal/polyhedral elements with an arbitrary number of faces. Because of utilising general shaped elements, the dG method shows a great flexibility in designing an adaptive algorithm by refining or coarsening general polytopic elements. Especially for solving the convection-dominated problems on which boundary and interior layers may appear and need a lot of degrees of freedom to resolve. Finally, we will present several numerical examples through different classes of linear PDEs to highlight the practical performance of the proposed method.

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Maxime Breden: Thursday 13 December at 11 am, A415 Inria Paris. The aim of a posteriori validation techniques is to obtain mathematically rigorous and quantitative existence theorems, using numerical simulations. Given an approximate solution, the general strategy is to combine a posteriori estimates with analytical ones to apply a fixed point theorem, which then yields the existence of a true solution in an explicit neighborhood of the approximate one. In the first part of the talk, I’ll present the main ideas in more detail, and describe the general framework in which they are applicable. In the second part, I’ll then focus on a specific example and explain how to validate a posteriori periodic solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations with a Taylor-Green type of forcing. This is joint work with Jan Bouwe van den Berg, Jean-Philippe Lessard and Lennaert van Veen.

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Simon Lemaire: Thursday 16 April at 3 pm, A415 Inria Paris. We are interested in physical settings presenting an interface between a classical (positive) material and a (negative) metamaterial, in such a way that the coefficients of the model change sign in the domain. We study, in the “elliptic” case, the numerical approximation of such sign-shifting problems. We introduce a new numerical method, based on domain decomposition and optimization, that we prove to be convergent, as soon as, for a given right-hand side, the problem admits a solution that is unique. The proof of convergence does not rely on any symmetry assumption on the mesh family with respect to the sign-changing interface. In that respect, it gives a more convenient alternative to T-coercivity based approximation in the situations when the latter is applicable, whereas it constitutes a new paradigm in the situations when the latter is not. We illustrate our findings on a comprehensive set of test-cases.

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Thirupathi Gudi: Tuesday 20 February at 3 pm, A415 Inria Paris. In this talk, we review some approaches for formulating the Dirichlet boundary control problem and then we present a new energy space based approach. We show that this new approach allows high regularity for both optimal control and the optimal state. Using, the optimality conditions at continuous level, we propose a finite element method for numerical solution and derive subsequent error estimates. We show some numerical experiments to illustrate the method.

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Franz Chouly: Thursday 15 February at 2 pm, A415 Inria Paris. In the first part of this talk, we will present a residual based a posteriori error estimate for contact problems in small strain elasticity, discretized with finite elements and Nitsche’s method. Upper and lower bounds are established under a saturation assumption. This theoretical results will be illustrated by some numerical experiments (joint work with Mathieu Fabre, Patrick Hild, Jérôme Pousin and Yves Renard). In the second part of this talk, we will present preliminary results on goal oriented error estimates for soft-tissue biomechanics, still under small strain assumptions. The performance of the Dual Weighted Residual method will be assessed for two simplified scenarios involving tongue muscular activation, and contraction of the arterial wall. Open mathematical questions and the potential interest of such a methodology for computational biomechanics will be discussed (joint work with Stéphane Bordas, Marek Bucki, Michel Duprez, Vanessa Lleras, Claudio Lobos, Alexei Lozinski, Pierre-Yves Rohan and Satyendra Tomar).

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Sébastien Furic: Thursday 30 November at 14 pm, A415 Inria Paris. This presentation aims at introducing the concept of System-Level Physical Model, with some emphasis on model construction and simulation. In particular, soundness of models and meaning and solution of associated differential equations will be discussed.

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