The Ritz Method for Boundary Problems with Essential Conditions as Constraints

We give an elementary derivation of an extension of the Ritz method to trial functions that do not satisfy essential boundary conditions. As in the Babuška-Brezzi approach boundary conditions are treated as variational constraints and Lagrange multipliers are used to remove them. However, we avoid the saddle point reformulation of the problem and therefore do not have to deal with the Babuška-Brezzi inf-sup condition. In higher dimensions boundary weights are used to approximate the boundary conditions, and the assumptions in our convergence proof are stated in terms of completeness of the trial functions and of the boundary weights. These assumptions are much more straightforward to verify than the Babuška-Brezzi condition. We also discuss limitations of the method and implementation issues that follow from our analysis and examine a number of examples, both analytic and numerical.