Development of a new, more regular, mortar method for the coupling of NURBS subdomains within a NURBS patch: Application to a non-intrusive local enrichment of NURBS patches

In this work, we develop a mortar method for the coupling of non-conforming NURBS subdomains within a NURBS patch that keeps the benefit of using more regular functions. The idea is to use two Lagrange multipliers to match, across the coupling interface, the tractions coming from the discrete displacements in addition to the discrete displacements. It results in a strategy that is suitable with the continuity of the physical solution: when the physical solution is sufficiently smooth, the strategy enables to represent a C-1 behavior; but, when only a C displacement is expected, no additional errors are introduced since only the traction force is continuous and not the whole derivative fields. Lower stress jumps at the coupling interface can then be observed which allows for a better transition of the information. As an application, a non-intrusive algorithm is also built to solve the proposed coupling method, which enables simple and flexible local enrichments of NURBS patches without losing the interest of using more regular functions. A range of numerical examples in two-dimensional linear elasticity are carried out along with comparisons with other published NURBS coupling techniques to demonstrate the performance of the proposed coupling and its interest when combined to a non-intrusive strategy. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.