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A family of inexpensive discretization schemes for diffusion problems on unstructured polygonal and polyhedral meshes is introduced. The material properties are described by a full tensor. The theoretical results are confirmed with numerical experiments.

New mimetic finite difference discretizations of diffusion problems on unstructured polyhedral meshes with strongly curved (non-planar) faces are developed. The material properties are described by a full tensor. The optimal convergence estimates, the second order for a scalar variable (pressure) and the first order for a vector variable (velocity), are proved.

This brief paper is an introduction to the papers published in a special issue devoted to survey on recent techniques for discretizing Partial Differential Equations on general polygonal and polyhedral meshes. The number of different techniques to deal with discretizations on polygonal and polyhedral meshes is quite huge, and their history is quite long. Here we concentrate on the most recent techniques, including Mimetic Finite Differences, Virtual Element Methods, and the recent developments, in this direction, of Finite Volumes and Discontinuous Galerkin Methods.

We present the essential ingredients in the Virtual Element Method for a simple linear elliptic second-order problem. We emphasize its computer implementation, which will enable interested readers to readily implement the method.

We consider a model Poisson problem in ${ℝ}^d$ ($d=2,3$) and establish error estimates for virtual element methods on polygonal or polyhedral meshes that can contain small edges ($d=2$) or small faces ($d=3$). Our results extend the ones in [L. Beirão da Veiga, C. Lovadina and A. Russo, Stability analysis for the virtual element method, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci.27 (2017) 2557–2594] for the original two-dimensional virtual element method from [L. Beirão da Veiga, F. Brezzi, A. Cangiani, G. Manzini, L. D. Marini and A. Russo, Basic principles of virtual element methods, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci.23 (2013) 199–214] to the version of the virtual element method in [B. Ahmad, A. Alsaedi, F. Brezzi, L. D. Marini and A. Russo, Equivalent projectors for virtual element methods, Comput. Math. Appl.66 (2013) 376–391] that can also be applied to problems in three dimensions.

We prove a discrete version of the first Weber inequality on three-dimensional hybrid spaces spanned by vectors of polynomials attached to the elements and faces of a polyhedral mesh. We then introduce two Hybrid High-Order methods for the approximation of the magnetostatics model, in both its (first-order) field and (second-order) vector potential formulations. These methods are applicable on general polyhedral meshes, and allow for arbitrary orders of approximation. Leveraging the previously established discrete Weber inequality, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the two methods. We finally validate them on a set of test-cases.

We present a four-field virtual element discretization for the time-dependent resistive magnetohydrodynamics equations in three space dimensions, focusing on the semi-discrete formulation. The proposed method employs general polyhedral meshes and guarantees velocity and magnetic fields that are divergence free up to machine precision. We provide a full convergence analysis under suitable regularity assumptions, which is validated by some numerical tests.

In this work, following the Discrete de Rham (DDR) paradigm, we develop an arbitrary-order discrete divdiv complex on general polyhedral meshes. The construction rests on (1) discrete spaces that are spanned by vectors of polynomials whose components are attached to mesh entities and (2) discrete operators obtained mimicking integration by parts formulas. We provide an in-depth study of the algebraic properties of the local complex, showing that it is exact on mesh elements with trivial topology. The new DDR complex is used to design a numerical scheme for the approximation of biharmonic problems, for which we provide detailed stability and convergence analyses. Numerical experiments complete the theoretical results.