A parabolic local problem with exponential decay of the resonance error for numerical homogenization

Abstract

This paper aims at an accurate and efficient computation of effective quantities, e.g. the homogenized coefficients for approximating the solutions to partial differential equations with oscillatory coefficients. Typical multiscale methods are based on a micro–macro-coupling, where the macromodel describes the coarse scale behavior, and the micromodel is solved only locally to upscale the effective quantities, which are missing in the macromodel. The fact that the microproblems are solved over small domains within the entire macroscopic domain, implies imposing artificial boundary conditions on the boundary of the microscopic domains. A naive treatment of these artificial boundary conditions leads to a first-order error in [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] represents the characteristic length of the small scale oscillations and [Formula: see text] is the size of microdomain. This error dominates all other errors originating from the discretization of the macro and the microproblems, and its reduction is a main issue in today’s engineering multiscale computations. The objective of this work is to analyze a parabolic approach, first announced in A. Abdulle, D. Arjmand, E. Paganoni, C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, Ser. I, 2019, for computing the homogenized coefficients with arbitrarily high convergence rates in [Formula: see text]. The analysis covers the setting of periodic microstructure, and numerical simulations are provided to verify the theoretical findings for more general settings, e.g. non-periodic microstructures.