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In this paper, two high-order finite element models are investigated for the solution of two-dimensional wave problems governed by the Helmholtz equation. Plane wave enriched finite elements, developed in the Partition of Unity Finite Element Method (PUFEM), and high-order Lagrangian-polynomial based finite elements are considered. In the latter model, the Chebyshev-Gauss-Lobatto nodal distribution is adopted and the approach is often referred to as the Spectral Element Method (SEM). The two strategies, PUFEM and SEM, were developed separately and the current study provides data on how they compare for solving short wave problems, in which the characteristic dimension is a multiple of the wavelength. The considered test examples include wave scattering by a rigid circular cylinder, evanescent wave cases and propagation of waves in a duct with rigid walls. The two approaches are assessed in terms of accuracy for increasing SEM order and PUFEM enrichment. The conditioning, discretization level, total number of storage locations and total number of non-zero entries are also compared.

Problems of multiple scales of interest or of locally nonsmooth solutions may often involve heterogeneous media. These problems are usually very demanding in terms of computations with the conventional finite element method. On the other hand, different enriched finite element methods such as the partition of unity, which proved to be very successful in treating similar problems, are developed and studied for homogeneous media. In this work, we present a new idea to extend the partition of unity finite element method to treat heterogeneous materials. The idea is studied in applications to wave scattering and heat transfer problems where significant advantages are noted over the standard finite element method. Although presented within the partition of unity context, the same enrichment idea can also be extended to other enriched methods to deal with heterogeneous materials.

An enriched partition of unity FEM is developed to solve time-dependent diffusion problems. In the present formulation, multiple exponential functions describing the spatial and temporal diffusion decay are embedded in the finite element approximation space. The resulting enrichment is in the form of a local asymptotic expansion. Unlike previous works in this area where the enrichment must be updated at each time step, here, the temporal decay in the solution is embedded in the asymptotic expansion. Thus, the system matrix that is evaluated at the first time step may be decomposed and retained for every next time step by just updating the right-hand side of the linear system of equations. The advantage is a significant saving in the computational effort where, previously, the linear system must be reevaluated and resolved at every time step. In comparison with the traditional finite element analysis with p-version refinements, the present approach is much simpler, more efficient, and yields more accurate solutions for a prescribed number of DoFs. Numerical results are presented for a transient diffusion equation with known analytical solution. The performance of the method is analyzed on two applications: the transient heat equation with a single source and the transient heat equation with multiple sources. The aim of such a method compared with the classical FEM is to solve time-dependent diffusion applications efficiently and with an appropriate level of accuracy.

The paper reviews the problem of modelling short-wave scattering. Short waves are understood to be waves in which the wavelength is much smaller than any other parameters in the problem. The background to wave problems is briefly described. The major numerical methods for wave modelling, finite elements, finite differences, boundary integrals and their variants are then outlined. The recent developments in algorithms in these fields are then very briefly summarized, as an introduction to the more specialized papers to come.