Singularly perturbed problems with characteristic layers : Supercloseness and postprocessing

In this thesis singularly perturbed convection-diffusion equations in the unit square are considered. Due to the presence of a small perturbation parameter the solutions of those problems exhibit an exponential layer near the outflow boundary and two parabolic layers near the characteristic boundaries. Discretisation of such problems on standard meshes and with standard methods leads to numerical solutions with unphysical oscillations, unless the mesh size is of order of the perturbation parameter which is impracticable. Instead we aim at uniformly convergent methods using layer-adapted meshes combined with standard methods. The meshes considered here are S-type meshes--generalisations of the standard Shishkin mesh. The domain is dissected in a non-layer part and layer parts. Inside the layer parts, the mesh might be anisotropic and non-uniform, depending on a mesh-generating function. We show, that the unstabilised Galerkin finite element method with bilinear elements on an S-type mesh is uniformly convergent in the energy norm of order (almost) one. Moreover, the numerical solution shows a supercloseness property, i.e. the numerical solution is closer to the nodal bilinear interpolant than to the exact solution in the given norm. Unfortunately, the Galerkin method lacks stability resulting in linear systems that are hard to solve. To overcome this drawback, stabilisation methods are used. We analyse different stabilisation techniques with respect to the supercloseness property. For the residual-based methods Streamline Diffusion FEM and Galerkin Least Squares FEM, the choice of parameters is addressed additionally. The modern stabilisation technique Continuous Interior Penalty FEM--penalisation of jumps of derivatives--is considered too. All those methods are proved to possess convergence and supercloseness properties similar to the standard Galerkin FEM. With a suitable postprocessing operator, the supercloseness property can be used to enhance the accuracy of the numerical solution and superconvergence of order (almost) two can be proved. We compare different postprocessing methods and prove superconvergence of above numerical methods on S-type meshes. To recover the exact solution, we apply continuous biquadratic interpolation on a macro mesh, a discontinuous biquadratic projection on a macro mesh and two methods to recover the gradient of the exact solution. Special attentions is payed to the effects of non-uniformity due to the S-type meshes. Numerical simulations illustrate the theoretical results