A Fictitious Domain Formulation with Bubble Enrichment

Abstract

The fictitious domain method offers a powerful alternative to circumvent complex mesh generation process by embedding the complex physical domain into a simpler, non-matching background mesh. Among the various strategies to enforce the boundary condition on such a mesh, one possibility is to impose it weakly through a Lagrange multiplier. Existing approaches following this strategy typically require two independent uniform meshes for the domain and the boundary, whose mesh sizes are related by a prescribed ratio. In this work, we relax this requirement by constructing the boundary mesh directly from the trace of the background triangulation. To recover the uniform discrete inf-sup condition under this weaker mesh assumption, we enrich the discrete space of the solution with bubble functions. Our main result is the construction of a suitable operator that allows us to prove this uniform discrete inf-sup condition, thereby establishing the stability of the resulting scheme. As a consequence, we derive optimal a priori error estimates and provide a numerical experiment to validate the theoretical results.