Stable extended finite element method: Convergence, Accuracy, Properties and Diffpack implementation

Problems involving singularities and moving boundaries, especially when they involve discontinuities, create difficulties for the finite element method. On another, albeit related, front, two diametrally opposed approaches are attempting to simplify the CAD to Analysis pipeline: isogeometric methods on the one hand [1] aim at coupling the geometry and field approximations, whilst implicit boundary definition-based methods attempt to decouple them [3,4,5].
We examine in this paper one instance of the latter approach, and rely on partition of unity enrichment of the field variable to capture discontinuities along material interface or domain boundaries. We study in particular the stable generalized finite element method of Babuˇka and Banerjee [6] for higher order approximations in two and three dimensions and propose a generic implementation within the C++ library Diffpack from inuTech GmbH [7]. In a companion paper, the implementation of enrichment within Diffpack is presented in more detail.
We will present results obtained with our 3D implementation of partition of unity enrichment within Diffpack. This implementation represents the interfaces through level-sets and palliates blending problems using various approaches. We study here the stabilisation approach proposed in [6] in more detail and pay particular attention to the global convergence rate of the approach and to the stability and the local flux converence close to the interfaces.