On a reduced sparsity stabilization of grad-div type for incompressible flow problems

We introduce a new operator for stabilizing error that arises from the weak enforcement of mass conservation in finite element simulations of incompressible flow problems. We show this new operator has a similar positive effect on velocity error as the well-known and very successful grad-div stabilization operator, but the new operator is more attractive from an implementation standpoint because it yields a sparser block structure matrix. That is, while grad-div produces fully coupled block matrices (i.e. block-full), the matrices arising from the new operator are block-upper triangular in two dimensions, and in three dimensions the 2,1 and 3,1 blocks are empty. Moreover, the diagonal blocks of the new operator's matrices are identical to those of grad-div. We provide error estimates and numerical examples for finite element simulations with the new operator, which reveals the significant improvement in accuracy it can provide. Solutions found using the new operator are also compared to those using usual grad-div stabilization, and in all cases, solutions are found to be very similar

Improving efficiency of coupled schemes for Navier--Stokes equations by a connection to grad-div stabilized projection methods

We prove that in finite element settings where the divergence-free subspace of the velocity space has optimal approximation properties, the solution of Chorin/Temam projection methods for Navier-Stokes equations equipped with grad-div stabilization with parameter γ, converge to the associated coupled method solution with rate γ-1 as γ → ∞. We prove this first for backward Euler schemes, and then extend the results to BDF2 schemes, and finally to schemes with outflow boundary conditions. Several numerical experiments are given which verify the convergence rate, and show how using projection methods in this setting with large grad-div stabilization parameters can dramatically improve accuracy

Convergent finite element discretizations of the nonstationary incompressible magnetohydrodynamics system

The incompressible MHD equations couple Navier-Stokes equations with Maxwell's equations to describe the flow of a viscous, incompressible, and electrically conducting fluid in a Lipschitz domain $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^3$. We verify convergence of iterates of different coupling and decoupling fully discrete schemes towards weak solutions for vanishing discretization parameters. Optimal first order of convergence is shown in the presence of strong solutions for a splitting scheme which decouples the computation of velocity field, pressure, and magnetic fields at every iteration step