Spectral Analysis of the Finite Element Matrices Approximating 3D Linearly Elastic Structures and Multigrid Proposals

Abstract

The so-called material distribution methods for topology optimization cast the governing equation as an extended or fictitious domain problem, in which a coefficient field represents the design. In practice, the finite element method is typically used to approximate that kind of governing equations by using a large number of elements to discretize the design domain, and an element-wise constant function approximates the coefficient field in that domain. This paper presents a spectral analysis of the coefficient matrices associated with the linear systems stemming from the finite element discretization of a linearly elastic problem for an arbitrary coefficient field in three spatial dimensions. The given theoretical analysis is used for designing and studying an optimal multigrid method in the sense that the (arithmetic) cost for solving the problem, up to a fixed desired accuracy, is linear in the corresponding matrix size. Few selected numerical examples are presented and discussed in connection with the theoretical findings.