Improving high-order VEM stability on badly-shaped elements

Abstract

For the 2D and 3D Virtual Element Methods (VEM), a new approach to improve the conditioning of local and global matrices in the presence of badly-shaped polytopes is proposed. It defines the local projectors and the local degrees of freedom with respect to a set of scaled monomials recomputed on more well-shaped polytopes. This new approach is less computationally demanding than using the orthonormal polynomial basis. The effectiveness of our procedure is tested on different numerical examples characterized by challenging geometries of increasing complexity.