Isogeometric Analysis : study of non-uniform degree and unstructured splines, and application to phase field modeling of corrosion

Isogeometric Analysis or IGA was introduced by Hughes et al. (2005) to facilitate efficient design-through-analysis cycles for engineered objects. The goal of this technology is the unification of geometric modeling and engineering analysis, and this is realized by exploiting smooth spline spaces used for the former as finite element spaces required for the latter. As intended, this allows the use of geometrically exact representations for the purpose of analysis. Several new spline constructions have been devised on grid-like meshes since IGA’s inception. The excellent approximation and robustness offered by them has rejuvenated the study of high order methods, and IGA has been successfully applied to myriad problems. However, an unintended consequence of adopting a splinebased design-through-analysis paradigm has been the inheritance of open problems that lie at the intersection of the fields of modeling and approximation using splines. The first two parts of this dissertation focus on two such problems: splines of non-uniform degree and splines on unstructured meshes. The last part of the dissertation is focused on phase field modeling of corrosion using splines. The development of non-uniform degree splines is driven by the observation that relaxing the requirement for a spline’s polynomial pieces to have the same degree would be very powerful in the context of both geometric modeling and IGA. This dissertation provides a complete solution in the univariate setting. A mathematically sound foundation for an efficient algorithmic evaluation of univariate non-uniform degree splines is derived. It is shown that the algorithm outputs a nonuniform degree B-spline basis and that, furthermore, it can be applied to create C¹ piecewise-NURBS of non-uniform degree with B-spline-like properties. In the bivariate setting, a theoretical study of the dimension of non-uniform degree splines on planar T-meshes and triangulations is carried out. Combinatorial lower and upper bounds on the spline space dimension are presented. For T-meshes, sufficient conditions for the bounds to coincide are provided, while for triangulations it is shown that the spline space dimension is stable in sufficiently high degree. Modeling complex geometries using only quadrilaterals leads, in general, to unstructured meshes. In locally structured regions of the mesh, smooth splines can be built following standard procedures. However, there is no canonical way of constructing smooth splines on an unstructured arrangement of quadrilateral elements. This dissertation proposes new spline constructions for the two types of unstructuredness that can be encountered – polar points (i.e., mesh vertices that are collapsed edges) and extraordinary points (i.e., mesh vertices shared by µ ≠ 4 quadrilaterals). On meshes containing polar points, smooth spline basis functions that form a convex partition of unity are built. Numerical tests presented to benchmark the construction indicate optimal approximation behavior. On meshes containing extraordinary points, two spline spaces are built, one for performing modeling and the other for approximation. The former is contained in the latter to ensure adherence to the philosophy of IGA. Excellent approximation behavior is observed during numerical benchmarking. Finally, a phase field model for corrosion is derived from first principles using Gurtin’s microforce theory and a Coleman–Noll type analysis. The derivation is general enough to include the effect of, for instance, mechanics on the process of corrosion, and an instance of such a coupled model is presented