Optimal and reduced quadrature rules for tensor product and hierarchically refined splines in isogeometric analysis

We continue the study initiated in Hughes et al. (2010) in search of optimal quadrature rules for tensor product and hierarchically refined splines in isogeometric analysis. These rules are optimal in the sense that there exists no other quadrature rule that can exactly integrate the elements of the given spline space with fewer quadrature points. We extend the algorithm presented in Hughes et al. (2010) with an improved starting guess, which combined with arbitrary precision arithmetic, results in the practical computation of quadrature rules for univariate non-uniform splines up to any precision. Explicit constructions are provided in sixteen digits of accuracy for some of the most commonly used uniform spline spaces defined by open knot vectors. We study the efficacy of the proposed rules in the context of full and reduced quadrature applied to two- and three-dimensional diffusion–reaction problems using tensor product and hierarchically refined splines, and prove a theorem rigorously establishing the stability and accuracy of the reduced rules.