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In this paper, we consider a reaction-diffusion boundary value problem in a three-dimensional thin domain. The very different length scales in the geometry result in an anisotropy effect. Our study is motivated by a parabolic heat conduction problem in a thin foil leading to such anisotropic reaction-diffusion problems in each time step of an implicit time integration method [7]. The reaction-diffusion problem contains two important parameters, namely ε >0 which parameterizes the thickness of the domain and μ >0 denoting the measure for the size of the reaction term relative to that of the diffusion term. In this paper we analyze the convergence of a multigrid method with a robust (line) smoother. Both, for the W- and the V-cycle method we derive contraction number bounds smaller than one uniform with respect to the mesh size and the parameters ε and μ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently an adaptive nonconforming finite element method (ANFEM) has been developed by Carstensen and Hoppe (in Numer Math 103:251–266, 2006). In this paper, we extend the result to some nonsymmetric and indefinite problems. The main tools in our analysis are a posteriori error estimators and a quasi-orthogonality property. In this case, we need to overcome two main difficulties: one stems from the nonconformity of the finite element space, the other is how to handle the effect of a nonsymmetric and indefinite bilinear form. An appropriate adaptive nonconforming finite element method featuring a marking strategy based on the comparison of the a posteriori error estimator and a volume term is proposed for the lowest order Crouzeix–Raviart element. It is shown that the ANFEM is a contraction for the sum of the energy error and a scaled volume term between two consecutive adaptive loops. Moreover, quasi-optimality in the sense of quasi-optimal algorithmic complexity can be shown for the ANFEM. The results of numerical experiments confirm the theoretical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]