Anisotropic mesh generation methods based on ACVT and natural metric for anisotropic elliptic equation——Dedicated to Professor Shi Zhong-Ci on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday

Anisotropic meshes are known to be well-suited for problems which exhibit anisotropic solution features. Defining an appropriate metric tensor and designing an efficient algorithm for anisotropic mesh gen- eration are two important aspects of the anisotropic mesh methodology. In this paper, we are concerned with the natural metric tensor for use in anisotropic mesh generation for anisotropic elliptic problems. We provide an algorithm to generate anisotropic meshes under the given metric tensor. We show that the inverse of the anisotropic diffusion matrix of the anisotropic elliptic problem is a natural metric tensor for the anisotropic mesh generation in three aspects： better discrete algebraic systems, more accurate finite element solution and superconvergence on the mesh nodes. Various numerical examples demonstrating the effectiveness are presented.