Reduced order modeling for elliptic problems with high contrast diffusion coefficients

Abstract

We consider the parametric elliptic PDE $-{\rm div} (a(y)\nabla u)=f$ on a spatial domain $\Omega$, with $a(y)$ a scalar piecewise constant diffusion coefficient taking any positive values $y=(y_1, \dots, y_d)\in ]0,\infty[^d$ on fixed subdomains $\Omega_1,\dots,\Omega_d$. This problem is not uniformly elliptic as the contrast $\kappa(y)=\frac{\max y_j}{\min y_j}$ can be arbitrarily high, contrarily to the Uniform Ellipticity Assumption (UEA) that is commonly made on parametric elliptic PDEs. Based on local polynomial approximations in the $y$ variable, we construct local and global reduced model spaces $V_n$ of moderate dimension $n$ that approximate uniformly well all solutions $u(y)$. Since the solution $u(y)$ blows as $y\to 0$, the solution manifold is not a compact set and does not have finite $n$-width. Therefore, our results for approximation by such spaces are formulated in terms of relative $H^1_0$-projection error, that is, after normalization by $\|u(y)\|_{H^1_0}$. We prove that this relative error decays exponentially with $n$, yet exhibiting the curse of dimensionality as the number $d$ of subdomains grows. We also show similar rates for the Galerkin projection despite the fact that high contrast is well-known to deteriorate the multiplicative constant when applying Cea's lemma. We finally establish uniform estimates in relative error for the state estimation and parameter estimation inverse problems, when $y$ is unknown and a limited number of linear measurements $\ell_i(u)$ are observed. A key ingredient in our construction and analysis is the study of the convergence of $u(y)$ to limit solutions when some of the parameters $y_j$ tend to infinity.