Dear Firedrakers, When taking a Firedrake (functional/form) derivative, say the derivative of the functional int (du/dx)^2 dx (plus some bc's) is the outcome the functional derivative (i) with or (ii) without integration by parts? I.e. is it: (ii) 2 int du/dx dv/dx dx or (i) -2 int d^2u/d x^2 v dx, modulo bc's, and with v = delta u? https://www.firedrakeproject.org/firedrake.html#firedrake.ufl_expr.derivativ... (I am trying to understand why the below would work, and it does, with CG1 for X, or in the above with CG1 for v and u, which only can work when no ibp is done. ) Kind regards, Onno PS: # Kinematics # Right Cauchy-Green tensor if self.nonlin: d = self.X.geometric_dimension() I = fd.Identity(d) # Identity tensor F = I + fd.grad(self.X) # Deformation gradient C = F.T*F E = (C-I)/2. # Green-Lagrangian strain # E = 1./2.*( fd.grad(self.X).T + fd.grad(self.X) + fd.grad(self.X).T * fd.grad(self.X) ) # alternative equivalent definition else: E = 1./2.*( fd.grad(self.X).T + fd.grad(self.X) ) # linear strain self.W = (self.lam/2.)*(fd.tr(E))**2 + self.mu*fd.tr( E*E ) # f = fd.Constant((0, 0, -self.g)) # body force / rho # T = self.surface_force() # Total potential energy Pi = self.W * fd.dx # Compute first variation of Pi (directional derivative about X in the direction of v) F_expr = fd.derivative(Pi, self.X, self.v)