Adaptive Mesh Refinement Strategies in Isogeometric Analysis - A Computational Comparison

Abstract: We explain four variants of an adaptive finite element method with cubic splines and compare their performance in simple elliptic model problems. The methods in comparison are Truncated Hierarchical B-splines with two different refinement strategies, T-splines with the refinement strategy introduced by Scott et al. in 2012, and T-splines with an alternative refinement strategy introduced by some of the authors. In four examples, including singular and non-singular problems of linear elasticity and the Poisson problem, the H1-errors of the discrete solutions, the number of degrees of freedom as well as sparsity patterns and condition numbers of the discretized problem are compared.