Solving Biharmonic Equations with Tri-Cubic C 1 Splines on Unstructured Hex Meshes.

Unstructured hex meshes are partitions of three spaces into boxes that can include irregular edges, where n ≠ 4 boxes meet along an edge, and irregular points, where the box arrangement is not consistent with a tensor-product grid. A new class of tri-cubic C 1 splines is evaluated as a tool for solving elliptic higher-order partial differential equations over unstructured hex meshes. Convergence rates for four levels of refinement are computed for an implementation of the isogeometric Galerkin approach applied to Poisson's equation and the biharmonic equation. The ratios of error are contrasted and superior to an implementation of Catmull-Clark solids. For the trivariate Poisson problem on irregularly partitioned domains, the reduction by 2 4 in the L 2 norm is consistent with the optimal convergence on a regular grid, whereas the convergence rate for Catmull-Clark solids is measured as O (h 3 ). The tri-cubic splines in the isogeometric framework correctly solve the trivariate biharmonic equation, but the convergence rate in the irregular case is lower than O( h 4 ). An optimal reduction of 2 4 is observed when the functions on the C 1 geometry are relaxed to be C 0 . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]