Compactness results for a Dirichlet energy of nonlocal gradient with applications

Abstract We prove two compactness results for function spaces with finite Dirichlet energy of half‐space nonlocal gradients. In each of these results, we provide sufficient conditions on a sequence of kernel functions that guarantee the asymptotic compact embedding of the associated nonlocal function spaces into the class of square‐integrable functions. Moreover, we will demonstrate that the sequence of nonlocal function spaces converges in an appropriate sense to a limiting function space. As an application, we prove uniform Poincaré‐type inequalities for sequence of half‐space gradient operators. We also apply the compactness result to demonstrate the convergence of appropriately parameterized nonlocal heterogeneous anisotropic diffusion problems. We will construct asymptotically compatible schemes for these type of problems. Another application concerns the convergence and robust discretization of a nonlocal optimal control problem.