Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Item
    Divergence-free reconstruction operators for pressure-robust Stokes discretizations with continuous pressure finite elements
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2016) Lederer, Philip L.; Linke, Alexander; Merdon, Christian; Schöberl, Joachim
    Classical inf-sup stable mixed finite elements for the incompressible (Navier-)Stokes equations are not pressure-robust, i.e., their velocity errors depend on the continuous pressure. However, a modification only in the right hand side of a Stokes discretization is able to reestablish pressure-robustness, as shown recently for several inf-sup stable Stokes elements with discontinuous discrete pressures. In this contribution, this idea is extended to low and high order Taylor-Hood and mini elements, which have continuous discrete pressures. For the modification of the right hand side a velocity reconstruction operator is constructed that maps discretely divergence-free test functions to exactly divergence-free ones. The reconstruction is based on local H (div)-conforming flux equilibration on vertex patches, and fulfills certain orthogonality properties to provide consistency and optimal a-priori error estimates. Numerical examples for the incompressible Stokes and Navier-Stokes equations confirm that the new pressure-robust Taylor-Hood and mini elements converge with optimal order and outperform significantly the classical versions of those elements when the continuous pressure is comparably large.
  • Item
    Refined a posteriori error estimation for classical and pressure-robust Stokes finite element methods
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2017) Lederer, Philip Lukas; Merdon, Christian; Schöberl, Joachim
    Recent works showed that pressure-robust modifications of mixed finite element methods for the Stokes equations outperform their standard versions in many cases. This is achieved by divergence-free reconstruction operators and results in pressure-independent velocity error estimates which are robust with respect to small viscosities. In this paper we develop a posteriori error control which reflects this robustness. The main difficulty lies in the volume contribution of the standard residual-based approach that includes the L2-norm of the right-hand side. However, the velocity is only steered by the divergence-free part of this source term. An efficient error estimator must approximate this divergence-free part in a proper manner, otherwise it can be dominated by the pressure error. To overcome this difficulty a novel approach is suggested that uses arguments from the stream function and vorticity formulation of the NavierStokes equations. The novel error estimators only take the curl of the righthand side into account and so lead to provably reliable, efficient and pressure-independent upper bounds in case of a pressure-robust method in particular in pressure-dominant situations. This is also confirmed by some numerical examples with the novel pressure-robust modifications of the TaylorHood and mini finite element methods.
  • Item
    Optimal L2 velocity error estimate for a modified pressure-robust Crouzeix-Raviart Stokes element
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2015) Linke, Alexander; Merdon, Christian; Wollner, Winnifried
    Recently, a novel approach for the robust discretization of the incompressible Stokes equations was proposed that slightly modifies the nonconforming Crouzeix-Raviart element such that its velocity error becomes pressure-independent. The modification results in an O(h) consistency error that allows straightforward proofs for the optimal convergence of the discrete energy norm of the velocity and of the L2 norm of the pressure. However, though the optimal convergence of the velocity in the L2 norm was observed numerically, it appeared to be nontrivial to prove. In this contribution, this gap is closed. Moreover, the dependence of the energy error estimates on the discrete inf-sup constant is traced in detail, which shows that classical error estimates are extremely pessimistic on domains with large aspect ratios. Numer-ical experiments in 2D and 3D illustrate the theoretical findings.