A convenient inclusion of inhomogeneous boundary conditions in minimal residual methods

Abstract: Inhomogeneous essential boundary conditions can be appended to a well-posed PDE to lead to a combined variational formulation. The domain of the corresponding operator is a Sobolev space on the domain $\Omega$ on which the PDE is posed, whereas the codomain is a Cartesian product of spaces, among them fractional Sobolev spaces of functions on $\partial\Omega$. In this paper, easily implementable minimal residual discretizations are constructed which yield quasi-optimal approximation from the employed trial space, in which the evaluation of fractional Sobolev norms is fully avoided.