Anisotropic mesh adaptation is studied for linear finite element solution of 3D anisotropic diffusion problems. The 𝕄-uniform mesh approach is used, where an anisotropic adaptive mesh is generated as a uniform one in the metric specified by a tensor. In addition to mesh adaptation, preservation of the maximum principle is also studied. Some new sufficient conditions for maximum principle preservation are developed, and a mesh quality measure is defined to server as a good indicator. Four different metric tensors are investigated: one is the identity matrix, one focuses on minimizing an error bound, another one on preservation of the maximum principle, while the fourth combines both. Numerical examples show that these metric tensors serve their purposes. Particularly, the fourth leads to meshes that improve the satisfaction of the maximum principle by the finite element solution while concentrating elements in regions where the error is large. Application of the anisotropic mesh adaptation to fractured reservoir simulation in petroleum engineering is also investigated, where unphysical solutions can occur and mesh adaptation can help improving the satisfaction of the maximum principle.

Nonnegative directional splittings of anisotropic diffusion operators in the divergence form are investigated. Conditions are established for nonnegative directional splittings to hold in a neighborhood of an arbitrary interior point. The result is used to construct monotone finite difference schemes for the boundary value problem of anisotropic diffusion operators. It is shown that such a monotone scheme can be constructed if the underlying diffusion matrix is continuous on the closure of the physical domain and symmetric and uniformly positive definite on the domain, the mesh spacing is sufficiently small, and the size of finite difference stencil is sufficiently large. An upper bound for the stencil size is obtained, which is determined completely by the diffusion matrix. Loosely speaking, the more anisotropic the diffusion matrix is, the larger stencil is required. An exception is the situation with a strictly diagonally dominant diffusion matrix where a three-by-three stencil is sufficient for the construction of a monotone finite difference scheme. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the theoretical findings.

In this paper, we are concerned with the constrained finite element method based on domain decomposition satisfying the discrete maximum principle for diffusion problems with discontinuous coefficients on distorted meshes. The basic idea of domain decomposition methods is used to deal with the discontinuous coefficients. To get the information on the interface, we generalize the traditional Neumann-Neumann method to the discontinuous diffusion tensors case. Then, the constrained finite element method is used in each subdomain. Comparing with the method of using the constrained finite element method on the global domain, the numerical experiments show that not only the convergence order is improved, but also the nonlinear iteration time is reduced remarkably in our method.

A weak Galerkin discretization of the boundary value problem of a general anisotropic diffusion problem is studied for preservation of the maximum principle. It is shown that the direct application of the M-matrix theory to the stiffness matrix of the weak Galerkin discretization leads to a strong mesh condition requiring all of the mesh dihedral angles to be strictly acute (a constant-order away from 90 degrees). To avoid this difficulty, a reduced system is considered and shown to satisfy the discrete maximum principle under weaker mesh conditions. The discrete maximum principle is then established for the full weak Galerkin approximation using the relations between the degrees of freedom located on elements and edges. Sufficient mesh conditions for both piecewise constant and general anisotropic diffusion matrices are obtained. These conditions provide a guideline for practical mesh generation for preservation of the maximum principle. Numerical examples are presented.

In this paper, we construct a global repair technique for the finite element scheme of anisotropic diffusion equations to enforce the repaired solutions satisfying the discrete maximum principle. It is an extension of the existing local repair technique. Both of the repair techniques preserve the total energy and are easy to be implemented. The numerical experiments show that these repair techniques do not destroy the accuracy of the finite element scheme, and the computational cost of the global repair technique is cheaper than the local repair technique when the diffusion tensors are highly anisotropic.

A Delaunay-type mesh condition is developed for a linear finite element approximation of two-dimensional anisotropic diffusion problems to satisfy a discrete maximum principle. The condition is weaker than the existing anisotropic non-obtuse angle condition and reduces to the well known Delaunay condition for the special case with the identity diffusion matrix. Numerical results are presented to verify the theoretical findings.

In this work, we present and discuss some modifications, in the form of two-sided estimation (and also for arbitrary source functions instead of usual sign-conditions), of continuous and discrete maximum principles for the reactiondiffusion problems solved by the finite element and finite difference methods.