On mesh refinement procedures for polygonal virtual elements

Abstract: This work concerns adaptive refinement procedures for meshes of polygonal virtual elements. Specifically, refinement procedures previously proposed by the authors for structured meshes are generalized for the challenging case of arbitrary element geometries arising in unstructured/Voronoi discretizations. Here, structured and unstructured meshes are considered and are created via Voronoi tessellation of sets of structured and unstructured seed points respectively. The novel mesh refinement procedures for both structured and unstructured meshes allow for accurate and efficient application of the virtual element method to challenging elastic problems in two-dimensions. The results demonstrate that the high efficacy of the proposed refinement procedures on structured meshes, as seen in previous work by the authors, is also achieved in the case of unstructured/Voronoi meshes. The versatility and efficacy of the refinement procedures demonstrated over a variety of mesh types indicates that the procedures are well-suited to virtual element applications.