An Investigation of Stabilization Scaling in Finite-Strain Virtual Element Methods for Hyperelasticity

Abstract

Low-order virtual element methods (VEM) compute a consistent finite-strain contribution through polynomial projections and rely on stabilization to control the unresolved modes in the projector kernel. In current hyperelastic VEM practice, stabilization is often defined by integrating a nonlinear surrogate energy over an auxiliary sub-triangulation and scaled through modified Lamé parameters and incompressibility factors; this can introduce sensitivity to the arbitrary internal tessellation, complicate consistent Newton linearization, and, most critically, inject bulk-dependent proxies into shear-type kernel penalties, artificially stiffening isochoric missing modes in the nearly incompressible regime. This work develops a submesh-free, kernel-only stabilization that decouples deviatoric and volumetric channels and is explicitly designed to scale like the current Newton tangent energy on the kernel: the deviatoric term is scaled solely by a shear measure and enhanced by bounded geometry-driven directional weights, while the volumetric term is scaled by an independent bulk measure and can be capped or suppressed as $ν\to 1/2$. A spectral framework is established in which the canonical VEM stability requirement on the kernel is characterized by generalized Rayleigh quotients and eigenvalue bounds, and it is shown under standard polygon regularity assumptions that the deviatoric stabilization is uniformly equivalent to $μ_E|\cdot|_{1,E}^2$ on the kernel with constants independent of mesh size and Poisson ratio. Element-level diagnostics confirm that classical surrogate-based stabilizations assign bulk-driven energy to isochoric kernel modes as $ν\to 1/2$, whereas the proposed decoupled stabilization remains shear-scaled; kernel spectra and Cook's membrane simulations in the nearly incompressible regime further support improved robustness across polygonal mesh families.