Finite Element Analysis. Barna Szabó
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The error of approximation over the entire domain is:
By Theorem 1.2, the exact value of the potential energy is
(1.131)
and the relative error in energy norm on the entire domain is:
(1.132)
Remark 1.13 In estimating the local error we used
Example 1.13 This example illustrates the distribution of the relative error among the elements for a fixed mesh and polynomial degree for selected fractional values of α. Uniform mesh on the domain
It is seen that for all values of α the maximum error is associated with the first element.
Example 1.14 This example illustrates the distribution of the relative error among the elements for a fixed mesh and polynomial degree for selected integer values of α. Uniform mesh on the domain
The error of approximation for
Remark 1.14 In the foregoing discussion it was tacitly assumed that all data computed by numerical integration were accurate and the coefficient matrices of the linear equations were such that small changes in the right‐hand‐side vector produce small changes in the solution vector. This happens when the condition number of the coefficient matrix is reasonably small. In the finite element method the condition number depends on the choice of the shape functions, the mapping functions and the mesh. In one‐dimensional setting the mapping is linear and the shape functions are energy‐orthogonal, therefore round‐off errors are not significant. This is not the case in two and three dimensions, however.
Table 1.4 Example: Element‐by‐element and total relative errors in energy norm (percent) for selected fractional values of α.
Element number | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
α | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|