A hierarchical approach to adaptive local refinement in isogeometric analysis

Adaptive local refinement is one of the key issues in Isogeometric Analysis. In this article we present an adaptive local refinement technique for isogeometric analysis based on extensions of hierarchical B-splines. We investigate the theoretical properties of the spline space to ensure fundamental properties like linear independence and partition of unity. Furthermore, we use concepts well-established in finite element analysis to fully integrate hierarchical spline spaces into the isogeometric setting. This also allows us to access a posteriori error estimation techniques. Numerical results for several different examples are given and they turn out to be very promising. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.