Isogeometric Tearing and Interconnecting Solvers for Linearized Elasticity in multi-patch Isogeometric Analysis

We consider the linearized elasticity equation, discretized with multi-patch Isogeometric Analysis. A standard discretization error analysis is based on Korn's inequality, which degrades for certain geometries, such as long and thin cantilevers. This phenomenon is known as geometry locking. We observe that high-order methods, like Isogeometric Analysis is beneficial in such a setting. The main focus of this paper is the construction and analysis of a domain decomposition solver, namely an Isogeometric Tearing and Interconnecting (IETI) solver, where we prove that the convergence behavior does not depend on the constant of Korn's inequality for the overall domain, but only on the corresponding constants for the individual patches. Moreover, our analysis is explicit in the choice of the spline degree. Numerical experiments are provided which demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed solver.