Dr Bishnu Lamichhane

© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York. The thin plate spline method is a widely used data fitting technique as it has the ability to smooth noisy data. Here we consider a mixed finite element discretisation of the thin plate spline. By using mixed finite elements the formulation can be defined in-terms of relatively simple stencils, thus resulting in a system that is sparse and whose size only depends linearly on the number of finite element nodes. The mixed formulation is obtained by introducing the gradient of the corresponding function as an additional unknown. The novel approach taken in this paper is to work with a pair of bases for the gradient and the Lagrange multiplier forming a biorthogonal system thus ensuring that the scheme is numerically efficient, and the formulation is stable. Some numerical results are presented to demonstrate the performance of our approach. A preconditioned conjugate gradient method is an efficient solver for the arising linear system of equations.

We consider a mixed finite element method for approximating the solution of nearly incompressible elasticity and Stokes equations. The finite element method is based on quadrilateral and hexahedral triangulation using primal and dual meshes. We use the standard bilinear and trilinear finite element space enriched with element-wise defined bubble functions with respect to the primal mesh for the displacement or velocity, whereas the pressure space is discretized by using a piecewise constant finite element space with respect to the dual mesh. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We present two simple finite element methods for the discretization of Reissner-Mindlin plate equations with clamped boundary condition. These finite element methods are based on discrete Lagrange multiplier spaces from mortar finite element techniques. We prove optimal a priori error estimates for both methods. The first approach is based on a so-called standard Lagrange multiplier space for the mortar finite element method, where the Lagrange multiplier basis functions are continuous. The second approach is based on a so-called dual Lagrange multiplier space, where the Lagrange multiplier basis functions are discontinuous. The advantage of using the second approach is that easy static condensation of degrees of freedom corresponding to the Lagrange multiplier is possibly leading to a symmetric positive definite formulation. © 2013 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We consider a mixed finite element method based on simplicial triangulations for a three-field formulation of linear elasticity. The three-field formulation is based on three unknowns: displacement, stress and strain. In order to obtain an efficient discretization scheme, we use a pair of finite element bases forming a biorthogonal system for the strain and stress. The biorthogonality relation allows us to statically condense out the strain and stress from the saddle-point system leading to a symmetric and positive-definite system. The strain and stress can be recovered in a post-processing step simply by inverting a diagonal matrix. Moreover, we show a uniform convergence of the finite element approximation in the incompressible limit. Numerical experiments are presented to support the theoretical results. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.

The uniform convergence of finite element approximations based on a modified Hu-Washizu formulation for the nearly incompressible linear elasticity is analyzed. We show the optimal and robust convergence of the displacement-based discrete formulation in the nearly incompressible case with the choice of approximations based on quadrilateral and hexahedral elements. These choices include bases that are well known, as well as newly constructed bases. Starting from a suitable three-field problem, we extend our a-dependent three-field formulation to geometrically nonlinear elasticity with Saint-Venant Kirchhoff law. Additionally, an a-dependent three-field formulation for a general hyperelastic material model is proposed. A range of numerical examples using different material laws for small and large strain elasticity is presented. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.