A locking free mixed FEM based on a pure pseudostress based formulation for the elasticity eigenproblem

Abstract

We analyze a novel locking-free mixed formulation for the elasticity eigenvalue problem in both two and three dimensions, expressed exclusively in terms of the pseudostress tensor. An important feature of this formulation is that it does not require the enforcement of symmetry, either in a weak or strong sense. The displacement of the structure is recovered via a postprocess of the computed pseudostress. We introduce a mixed finite element method based in the tensorial version of the standard families of finite elements to discretize the space $\boldsymbol{\mathcal{H}}(\bdiv)$. We prove convergence and a priori error estimates under the theory of non-compact operators. Additionally, we perform an a posteriori error analysis for the problem, proving reliability and efficiency of the proposed indicator. We validate our theoretical results with numerical tests on different geometrical and physical configurations.