Improved conditioning of isogeometric analysis matrices for trimmed geometries

A stable basis for isogeometric analysis of trimmed models is obtained by combining extended B-splines with truncated hierarchical B-splines. While extended B-splines guarantee that the condition number of system matrices is independent of the location of a trimming curve, local refinement is used to improve the robustness of the procedure and the accuracy of the numerical results. The present extended B-spline construction works in the context of Galerkin and collocation methods. The paper focuses on the latter and introduces a new collocation scheme for truncated hierarchical B-splines. A proper transition between refinement levels is assured by a novel balancing algorithm that employs a simple criterion. The enhanced performance of the locally refined stabilization is verified by scalar Laplace and linear elasticity problems analyzed by a collocation based isogeometric boundary element method. The proposed approach yields excellent results and requires few refinement levels to improve the stabilization procedure and accuracy along trimming curves.