# 2D Laplace Problem

All of the above was written for a one-dimensional example. We now extend the Laplace problem to two dimensions and highlight the changes to the corresponding Nutils implementation. Let $$Ω$$ be a unit square with boundary $$Γ$$, on which the following boundary conditions apply:

$\begin{cases} u = 0 & Γ_\text{left} \\ \frac{∂u}{∂x_i} n_i = 0 & Γ_\text{bottom} \\ \frac{∂u}{∂x_i} n_i = \cos(1) \cosh(x_1) & Γ_\text{right} \\ u = \cosh(1) \sin(x_0) & Γ_\text{top} \end{cases}$

The 2D homogeneous Laplace solution is the field $$u$$ for which $$R(v, u) = 0$$ for all v, where

$R(v, u) := \int_Ω \frac{∂v}{∂x_i} \frac{∂u}{∂x_i} \ dV - \int_{Γ_\text{right}} v \cos(1) \cosh(x_1) \ dS.$

Adopting a Finite Element basis $${φ_n}$$ we obtain the discrete solution $$\hat{u}(x) = φ_n(x) \hat{u}_n$$ and the system of equations $$R(φ_n, \hat{u}) = 0$$.

Following the same steps as in the 1D case, a unit square mesh with 10x10 elements is formed using nutils.mesh.rectilinear:

nelems = 10
topo, geom = mesh.rectilinear([
numpy.linspace(0, 1, nelems+1), numpy.linspace(0, 1, nelems+1)])


Recall that nutils.mesh.rectilinear takes a list of element vertices per dimension. Alternatively you can create a unit square mesh using nutils.mesh.unitsquare, specifying the number of elements per dimension and the element type:

topo, geom = mesh.unitsquare(nelems, 'square')


The above two statements generate exactly the same topology and geometry. Try replacing 'square' with 'triangle' or 'mixed' to generate a unit square mesh with triangular elements or a mixture of square and triangular elements, respectively.

We start with a clean namespace, assign the geometry to ns.x, create a linear basis and define the solution ns.u as the contraction of the basis with argument lhs.

ns = Namespace()
ns.x = geom
ns.basis = topo.basis('std', degree=1)
ns.u = function.dotarg('lhs', ns.basis)


Note that the above statements are identical to those of the one-dimensional example.

The residual is implemented as

res = topo.integral('∇_i(basis_n) ∇_i(u) dV' @ ns, degree=2)
res -= topo.boundary['right'].integral('basis_n cos(1) cosh(x_1) dS' @ ns, degree=2)


The Dirichlet boundary conditions are rewritten as a least squares problem and solved for lhs, yielding the constraints vector cons:

sqr = topo.boundary['left'].integral('u^2 dS' @ ns, degree=2)
sqr += topo.boundary['top'].integral('(u - cosh(1) sin(x_0))^2 dS' @ ns, degree=2)
cons = solver.optimize('lhs', sqr, droptol=1e-15)
# optimize > solve > solving 21 dof system to machine precision using arnoldi solver
# optimize > solve > solver returned with residual 3e-17±2e-15
# optimize > constrained 21/121 dofs
# optimize > optimum value 4.32e-10±1e-9


To solve the problem res=0 for lhs subject to lhs=cons excluding the nan values, we can use nutils.solver.solve_linear:

lhs = solver.solve_linear('lhs', res, constrain=cons)
# solve > solving 100 dof system to machine precision using arnoldi solver
# solve > solver returned with residual 2e-15±2e-15


Finally, we plot the solution. We create a nutils.sample.Sample object from topo and evaluate the geometry and the solution:

bezier = topo.sample('bezier', 9)
x, u = bezier.eval(['x_i', 'u'] @ ns, lhs=lhs)


We use plt.tripcolor to plot the sampled x and u:

plt.tripcolor(x[:,0], x[:,1], bezier.tri, u, shading='gouraud', rasterized=True)
plt.colorbar()
plt.gca().set_aspect('equal')
plt.xlabel('x_0')
plt.ylabel('x_1')


This two-dimensional example is also available as the script examples/laplace.py.