A mortar method based on NURBS for curved interfaces

To tackle general sub-domain problems in geomechanics, we present an MFEM scheme on curved interfaces based on NURBS curves and surfaces. The goal is to have a more robust geometrical representation for mortar spaces, which allows gluing non-conforming interfaces on realistic geometries. The resulting mortar saddle-point problem is decoupled using standard domain decomposition techniques such as Dirichlet–Neumann, to exploit current parallel machine architectures. Two- and three-dimensional examples ranging from near-wellbore applications to field level subsidence computations show that the proposed scheme can handle problems of practical interest.