A New Approach to Handle Curved Meshes in the Hybrid High-Order Method

Abstract

Abstract We present here a novel approach to handling curved meshes in polytopal methods within the framework of hybrid high-order methods. The hybrid high-order method is a modern numerical scheme for the approximation of elliptic PDEs. An extension to curved meshes allows for the strong enforcement of boundary conditions on curved domains and for the capture of curved geometries that appear internally in the domain e.g. discontinuities in a diffusion coefficient. The method makes use of non-polynomial functions on the curved faces and does not require any mappings between reference elements/faces. Such an approach does not require the faces to be polynomial and has a strict upper bound on the number of degrees of freedom on a curved face for a given polynomial degree. Moreover, this approach of enriching the space of unknowns on the curved faces with non-polynomial functions should extend naturally to other polytopal methods. We show the method to be stable and consistent on curved meshes and derive optimal error estimates in $$L^2$$ L 2 and energy norms. We present numerical examples of the method on a domain with curved boundary and for a diffusion problem such that the diffusion tensor is discontinuous along a curved arc.