# Displacement field not correct?

Consider the elastic equation $$- \operatorname{div}(C \nabla \mathbf{u}) = \mathbf{f}$$ as presented in step-8. Here $$\mathbf{u}$$ is the displacement vector, let's consider the 2d case.

As you can see in the setup_system, they impose homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Then I'd expect to see that the two plots of $$x$$ and $$y$$ displacements have 0 as boundary value. However, this is not happening, and I can't understand why. You can see the x_displacement in the following Paraview screenshot. Notice the $$-1.6 e-4$$ value at the boundary.

• How do you know that the negative value is at the boundary and not somewhere in the interior? :-) Jun 15, 2021 at 18:23
• shame on me :-) Is there any way to print the values of the solution at the boundary, like a for loop and then std::cout? I would loop over all cells, then over all faces, I identify the ones that are on the boundary, and then I'd like to access the solution vector at the degrees of freedom of that boundary face. How can I get the dofs for a boundary face? @WolfgangBangerth Jun 16, 2021 at 7:33
• Someone has thought of that already and wrote the DataOutFaces class :-) Jun 16, 2021 at 23:32

## 1 Answer

As mentioned by @Wolfgang Bangerth , the value may be at the interior points. However, to visualise that better in paraview, You can use a filter called "plot over line" which plots the data points over a given line, which could come very handy for these kinds of clarifications in future.