Some abstract error estimates of a finite volume scheme for a nonstationary heat equation on general nonconforming multidimensional spatial meshes

Abstract

A general class of nonconforming meshes has been recently studied for stationary anisotropic heterogeneous diffusion problems by R. Eymard and coworkers. Thanks to these basic ideas developed for stationary problems, we derive a new discretization scheme in order to approximate the nonstationary heat problem. The unknowns of this scheme are the values at the centre of the control volumes, at some internal interfaces, and at the mesh points of the time discretization. Although the numerical scheme stems from the finite volume method, its formulation is based on the discrete version for the weak formulation defined for the heat problem. We derive error estimates for the solution in discrete norm, and an error estimate for an approximation of the gradient, in a general framework in which the discrete bilinear form is satisfying ellipticity. We prove in particular, that, when the discrete flux is calculated using a stabilized discrete gradient, the convergence order is h+k , where h (resp. k) is the mesh size of the spatial (resp. time) discretization. This estimate is valid under the regularity assumption that the exact solution is twice continuously differentiable in time and space. These error estimates are useful because they allow us to get error estimates for the approximations of the exact solution and its first derivatives