Introduction to the Web-method and its applications

The Web-method is a meshless finite element technique which uses weighted extended B-splines (Web-splines) on a tensor product grid as basis functions. It combines the computational advantages of B-splines and standard mesh-based elements. In particular, degree and smoothness can be chosen arbitrarily without substantially increasing the dimension. Hence, accurate approximations are obtained with relatively few parameters. Moreover, the regular grid is well suited for hierarchical refinement and multigrid techniques. This article should serve as an introduction to finite element approximation with B-splines. We first review the construction of Web-bases and discuss their basic properties. Then we illustrate the performance of Ritz-Galerkin schemes for a model problem and applications in linear elasticity. Finally, we discuss several implementation aspects.