We present an efficient method for the computation of homogenized coefficients of divergence-form operators with random coefficients. The approach is based on a multiscale representation of the homogenized coefficients. We then implement the method numerically using a finite-element method with hierarchical hybrid grids, which is a semi-implicit method allowing for significant gains in memory usage and execution time. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on two- and three-dimensional examples, for piecewise-constant coefficients with corner discontinuities. For moderate ellipticity contrast and for a precision of a few percentage points, our method allows to compute the homogenized coefficients on a laptop computer in a few seconds, in two dimensions, or in a few minutes, in three dimensions.
It has been observed long ago that inappropriate boundary conditions for approximate cell problems'' can cause important resonant errors'', and initial attempts at bypassing the problem involved the notion of oversampling @cite_5 @cite_11 @cite_45 @cite_57 . A powerful approach has been studied in @cite_32 @cite_42 @cite_7 @cite_26 @cite_40 @cite_31 @cite_28 @cite_16 , based on the introduction of a small zero-order term in the equation. The method we propose here, by combining this idea with a multiscale decomposition, enables to take fuller advantage of this idea. We refer to @cite_39 for a detailed comparison between the single-scale and the multiscale approaches. As is shown in @cite_53 , the benefits of the multiscale approach can be seen even in the setting of periodic coefficient fields, if we operate under the constraint that the lattice of periods is unknown.
@cite_26 @cite_7 @cite_28 @cite_53 @cite_42 @cite_32 @cite_39 @cite_57 @cite_40 @cite_45 @cite_5 @cite_31 @cite_16 @cite_11
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We introduce and analyze a numerical strategy to approximate effective coefficients in stochastic homogenization of discrete elliptic equations. In particular, we consider the simplest case possible: An elliptic equation on the @math -dimensional lattice @math with independent and identically distributed conductivities on the associated edges. Recent results by Otto and the author quantify the error made by approximating the homogenized coefficient by the averaged energy of a regularized corrector (with parameter @math ) on some box of finite size @math . In this article, we replace the regularized corrector (which is the solution of a problem posed on @math ) by some practically computable proxy on some box of size @math , and quantify the associated additional error. In order to improve the convergence, one may also consider @math independent realizations of the computable proxy, and take the arithmetic mean of the associated approximate homogenized coefficients. A natural optimization problem consists in properly choosing @math and @math in order to reduce the error at given computational complexity. Our analysis is sharp and allows us to give a clear answer to this question. In particular, we propose and analyze a numerical algorithm to approximate the homogenized coefficients, taking advantage of the (nearly) optimal scalings of the errors we derive. The efficiency of the approach is illustrated by a numerical study in dimension 2. This is the second article of a series of papers on stochastic homogenization of discrete elliptic equations. We consider a discrete elliptic equation on the @math -dimensional lattice @math with random coefficients @math of the simplest type: They are identically distributed and independent from edge to edge. On scales large w. r. t. the lattice spacing (i. e. unity), the solution operator is known to behave like the solution operator of a (continuous) elliptic equation with constant deterministic coefficients. This symmetric ''homogenized'' matrix @math is characterized by @math for any direction @math , where the random field @math (the ''corrector'') is the unique solution of @math in @math such that @math , @math is stationary and @math , @math denoting the ensemble average (or expectation). In order to approximate the homogenized coefficients @math , the corrector problem is usually solved in a box @math of size @math with periodic boundary conditions, and the space averaged energy on @math defines an approximation @math of @math . Although the statistics is modified (independence is replaced by periodic correlations) and the ensemble average is replaced by a space average, the approximation @math converges almost surely to @math as @math . In this paper, we give estimates on both errors. To be more precise, we do not consider periodic boundary conditions on a box of size @math , but replace the elliptic operator by @math with (typically) @math , as standard in the homogenization literature. We then replace the ensemble average by a space average on @math , and estimate the overall error on the homogenized coefficients in terms of @math and @math . This article deals with the numerical approximation of effective coefficients in stochastic homogenization of discrete linear elliptic equations. The originality of this work is the use of a well-known abstract spectral representation formula to design and analyze effective and computable approximations of the homogenized coefficients. In particular, we show that information on the edge of the spectrum of the generator of the environment viewed by the particle projected on the local drift yields bounds on the approximation error, and conversely. Combined with results by Otto and the first author in low dimension, and results by the second author in high dimension, this allows us to prove that for any dimension d ≥ 2, there exists an explicit numerical strategy to approximate homogenized coefficients which converges at the rate of the central limit theorem. Abstract This paper presents two new approaches for finding the homogenized coefficients of multiscale elliptic PDEs. Standard approaches for computing the homogenized coefficients suffer from the so-called resonance error, originating from a mismatch between the true and the computational boundary conditions. Our new methods, based on solutions of parabolic and elliptic cell problems, result in an exponential decay of the resonance error. We consider a discrete elliptic equation with random coefficients @math , which (to fix ideas) are identically distributed and independent from grid point to grid point @math . On scales large w. r. t. the grid size (i. e. unity), the solution operator is known to behave like the solution operator of a (continuous) elliptic equation with constant deterministic coefficients. These symmetric ''homogenized'' coefficients @math are characterized by @math where the random field @math is the unique stationary solution of the ''corrector problem'' @math and @math denotes the ensemble average. It is known (''by ergodicity'') that the above ensemble average of the energy density @math , which is a stationary random field, can be recovered by a system average. We quantify this by proving that the variance of a spatial average of @math on length scales @math is estimated as follows: @math where the averaging function (i. e. @math , @math ) has to be smooth in the sense that @math . In two space dimensions (i. e. @math ), there is a logarithmic correction. In other words, smooth averages of the energy density @math behave like as if @math would be independent from grid point to grid point (which it is not for @math ). This result is of practical significance, since it allows to estimate the error when numerically computing @math . In quasi-periodic or nonlinear periodic homogenization, the corrector problem must be in general set on the whole space. Numerically computing the homogenization coefficient therefore implies a truncation error, due to the fact that the problem is approximated on a bounded, large domain. We present here an approach that improves the rate of convergence of this approximation. The main goal of this paper is to define and study new methods for the computation of effective coefficients in the homogenization of divergence-form operators with random coefficients. The methods introduced here are proved to have optimal computational complexity and are shown numerically to display small constant prefactors. In the spirit of multiscale methods, the main idea is to rely on a progressive coarsening of the problem, which we implement via a generalization of the Green–Kubo formula. The technique can be applied more generally to compute the effective diffusivity of any additive functional of a Markov process. In this broader context, we also discuss the alternative possibility of using Monte Carlo sampling and show how a simple one-step extrapolation can considerably improve the performance of this alternative method. Many multiscale methods are based on the idea of extracting macroscopic behavior of solutions by solving an array of microscale models over small domains. A key ingredient in such multiscale methods is the boundary condition and the size of the computational domain over which the microscale problems are solved. This problem is systematically investigated in the present paper in the context of modeling strongly heterogeneous media. Three different boundary conditions are considered: the periodic boundary condition, Dirichlet boundary condition, and the Neumann boundary condition. Each is applied to several benchmark problems: the random checker-board problem, periodic problem with isotropic macroscale behavior, periodic problem with anisotropic macroscale behavior and periodic laminated media. In each case, convergence studies are conducted as the domain size for the microscale problem is changed. Convergence rates as well as the size of fluctuations in the computed effective coefficients are compared for the different formulations. In addition, we will discuss a mixed Dirichlet-Neumann boundary condition that is often used in porous medium modeling. We explain why that leads to unsatisfactory results and how it can be corrected. Also discussed are the different averaging methods used in extracting the effective coefficients. In this paper, we study a multiscale finite element method for solving a class of elliptic problems arising from composite materials and flows in porous media, which contain many spatial scales. The method is designed to efficiently capture the large scale behavior of the solution without resolving all the small scale features. This is accomplished by constructing the multiscale finite element base functions that are adaptive to the local property of the differential operator. Our method is applicable to general multiple-scale problems without restrictive assumptions. The construction of the base functions is fully decoupled from element to element; thus, the method is perfectly parallel and is naturally adapted to massively parallel computers. For the same reason, the method has the ability to handle extremely large degrees of freedom due to highly heterogeneous media, which are intractable by conventional finite element (difference) methods. In contrast to some empirical numerical upscaling methods, the multiscale method is systematic and self- consistent, which makes it easier to analyze. We give a brief analysis of the method, with emphasis on the “resonant sampling” effect. Then, we propose an oversampling technique to remove the resonance effect. We demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our method through extensive numerical experiments, which include problems with random coefficients and problems with continuous scales. Parallel implementation and performance of the method are also addressed. This article is concerned with numerical methods to approximate effective coefficients in stochastic homogenization of discrete linear elliptic equations, and their numerical analysis --- which has been made possible by recent contributions on quantitative stochastic homogenization theory by two of us and by Otto. This article makes the connection between our theoretical results and computations. We give a complete picture of the numerical methods found in the literature, compare them in terms of known (or expected) convergence rates, and study them numerically. Two types of methods are presented: methods based on the corrector equation, and methods based on random walks in random environments. The numerical study confirms the sharpness of the analysis (which it completes by making precise the prefactors, next to the convergence rates), supports some of our conjectures, and calls for new theoretical developments.