Gradient Robust Mixed Methods for Nearly Incompressible Elasticity

Within the last years pressure robust methods for the discretization of incompressible fluids have been developed. These methods allow the use of standard finite elements for the solution of the problem while simultaneously removing a spurious pressure influence in the approximation error of the velocity of the fluid, or the displacement of an incompressible solid. To this end, reconstruction operators are utilized mapping discretely divergence free functions to divergence free functions. This work shows that the modifications proposed for Stokes equation by Linke (Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 268:782–800, 2014) also yield gradient robust methods for nearly incompressible elastic materials without the need to resort to discontinuous finite elements methods as proposed in Fu et al. (J Sci Comput 86(3):39–30, 2021).