The effect of numerical integration in the FEM for elliptic problems with mixed boundary conditions

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of quadrature accuracy for volume and face integrals in the finite element method using $p$-th order polynomial shape functions for elliptic problems with mixed Dirichlet and Robin boundary conditions. The optimal $p$-th order $H^1$-convergence is maintained when numerical integration with algebraic precision at least $2p-2$ for volume terms and at least $2p-1$ for face terms is adopted. For $L^2$-error, we achieve optimal $O(h^{p+1})$ convergence when using quadrature rules of precision no less than $\max\{p,2p-2\}$ for volume terms and no less than $2p-1$ for face terms. Of particular significance, we present two examples to show that the above result on $L^2$-error is sharp for the linear FEM ($p=1$). When reduced to the case of Dirichlet boundary condition, our results yield improved dependence on the given data compared to the classical results established by Ciarlet, \textit{et al}. Numerical experiments are provided to illustrate the theoretical findings and confirm the necessity of specified quadrature accuracy and data regularity.