Towards computable flows and robust estimates for inf-sup stable FEM applied to the time-dependent incompressible Navier-Stokes equations

Abstract

Inf-sup stable FEM applied to time-dependent incompressible Navier-Stokes flows are considered. The focus lies on robust estimates for the kinetic and dissipation energies in a twofold sense. Firstly, pressure-robustness ensures the fulfilment of a fundamental invariance principle and velocity error estimates are not corrupted by the pressure approximability. Secondly, Re-semirobustness means that constants appearing on the right-hand side of kinetic and dissipation energy error estimates (including Gronwall constants) do not explicitly depend on the Reynolds number. Such estimates rely on the essential regularity assumption which is discussed in detail. In the sense of best practice, we review and establish pressure- and Re-semirobust estimates for pointwise divergence-free H1-conforming FEM (like Scott-Vogelius pairs or certain isogeometric based FEM) and pointwise divergence-free H(div)-conforming discontinuous Galerkin FEM. For convection-dominated problems, the latter naturally includes an upwind stabilisation for the velocity which is not gradient-based.