A Nodal Sparse Grid Spectral Element Method for Multi-Dimensional Elliptic Partial Differential Equations

Abstract

We develop a sparse grid spectral element method using nodal bases on Chebyshev-Gauss-Lobatto points for multi-dimensional elliptic equations. Since the quadratures based on sparse grid points do not have the accuracy of a usual Gauss quadrature, we construct the mass and stiffness matrices using a pseudo-spectral approach, which is exact for problems with constant coefficients and uniformly structured grids. Compared with the regular spectral element method, the proposed method has the flexibility of using a much less degree of freedom. In particular, we can use less points on edges to form a much smaller Schur-complement system with better conditioning. Preliminary error estimates and some numerical results are also presented.