On the necessity of Nitsche term. Part II: An alternative approach

The aim of this article is to explore the possibility of using a family of fixed finite element shape functions that does not match the domain to solve a boundary value problem with Dirichlet boundary condition. The domain is embedded in a bounding box and the finite element approximation is associated to a regular structured mesh of the box. The shape of the domain is independent of the discretization mesh. In these conditions, a meshing tool is never required. This may be especially useful in the case of evolving domains, for example shape optimization or moving interfaces. Nitsche method has been intensively applied. However, Nitsche is weighted with the mesh size h and therefore is a purely discrete point of view with no interpretation in terms of a continuous variational approach associated with a boundary value problem. In this paper, we introduce an alternative to Nitsche method which is associated with a continuous bilinear form. This extension has strong restrictions: it needs more regularity on the data than the usual method. We prove the well-posedness of our formulation and error estimates. We provide numerical comparisons with Nitsche method.