Galerkin Method - Analysis of Galerkin Methods

Analysis of Galerkin Methods

Here, we will restrict ourselves to symmetric bilinear forms, that is

While this is not really a restriction of Galerkin methods, the application of the standard theory becomes much simpler. Furthermore, a Petrov–Galerkin method may be required in the nonsymmetric case.

The analysis of these methods proceeds in two steps. First, we will show that the Galerkin equation is a well-posed problem in the sense of Hadamard and therefore admits a unique solution. In the second step, we study the quality of approximation of the Galerkin solution .

The analysis will mostly rest on two properties of the bilinear form, namely

• Boundedness: for all holds

  for some constant

• Ellipticity: for all holds

  for some constant

By the Lax-Milgram theorem (see weak formulation), these two conditions imply well-posedness of the original problem in weak formulation. All norms in the following sections will be norms for which the above inequalities hold (these norms are often called an energy norm).