56CHAPTER 5.

FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS FOR MAXWELL’S EQUATIONS

5.1 Introduction
Let Th be a regular tetrahedral partition of the domain Ω. Denote by U (k, Th ) ⊂
H0 (curl, Ω) the kth order Nédélec edge element space and by V (k, Th ) ⊂ H0 (div, Ω)
the kth order Lagrange element space. The finite element approximation of the
variational problem (4.9) is to find Eh ∈ U (k, Th ) such that

(5.1) a(Eh , v) = (F, v) for all v ∈ U (k, Th ).

Clearly, U (k, Th ) has the following discrete Helmholtz decomposition

U (k, Th ) = U⊥ (k, Th ) ⊕ ∇V (k, Th ),

where

U⊥ (k, Th ) = {vh ∈ U (k, Th ) : (εvh , ∇qh ) = 0 for all qh ∈ V (k, Th )}.

Similarly, we may make the discrete Helmholtz decomposition for the discrete solu-
tion

(5.2) Eh = E⊥
h + ∇ψh , E⊥
h ∈ U⊥ (k, Th ), ψh ∈ V (k, Th ).

In fact, ψh is the unique solution to the following discrete elliptic problem

(5.3) − κ2 (ε∇ψh , ∇qh ) = a(Eh , ∇qh ) = (F, ∇qh ) for all qh ∈ V (k, Th ).

Since Reε ≥ 1, we have the stability estimates

|ψh |H 1 (Ω) ≤ C k E k(L2 (Ω))3 ,

(5.4) k E⊥
h kH(curl,Ω) ≤ C k Eh kH(curl,Ω) ≤ C k E k(L2 (Ω))3 .

Obviously, (5.3) is the Galerkin approximation of (4.10). It follows from Céa lemma
that

(5.5) k ψ − ψh kH 1 (Ω) ≤ C inf k ψ − vh kH 1 (Ω) .

vh ∈V (k,Th )

The rest of the chapter will be devoted to the estimate k E⊥ − E⊥

h kH(curl,Ω) .