GRADIENT BOUNDS FOR WACHSPRESS COORDINATES ON POLYTOPES

We derive upper and lower bounds on the gradients of Wachspress coordinates defined over any simple convex d-dimensional polytope P. The bounds are in terms of a single geometric quantity h(*), which denotes the minimum distance between a vertex of P and any hyperplane containing a nonincident face. We prove that the upper bound is sharp for d = 2 and analyze the bounds in the special cases of hypercubes and simplices. Additionally, we provide an implementation of the Wachspress coordinates on convex polyhedra using MATLAB and employ them in a three-dimensional finite element solution of the Poisson equation on a nontrivial polyhedral mesh. As expected from the upper bound derivation, the H-1-norm of the error in the method converges at a linear rate with respect to the size of the mesh elements.