A high-order staggered meshless method for elliptic problems

Abstract

We present a new meshless method for scalar diffusion equations which is motivated by their compatible discretizations on primal-dual grids. Unlike the latter though, our approach is truly meshless because it only requires the graph of nearby neighbor connectivity of the discretization points $\bm{x}_i$. This graph defines a local primal-dual grid complex with a \emph{virtual} dual grid, in the sense that specification of the dual metric attributes is implicit in the method's construction. Our method combines a topological gradient operator on the local primal grid with a Generalized Moving Least Squares approximation of the divergence on the local dual grid. We show that the resulting approximation of the div-grad operator maintains polynomial reproduction to arbitrary orders and yields a meshless method, which attains $O(h^{m})$ convergence in both $L^2$ and $H^1$ norms, similar to mixed finite element methods. We demonstrate this convergence on curvilinear domains using manufactured solutions. Application of the new method to problems with discontinuous coefficients reveals solutions that are qualitatively similar to those of compatible mesh-based discretizations.