Surface couplings for subdomain-wise isoviscous gradient based Stokes finite element discretizations (Q1742675)

The paper deals with the numerical solution of non-isoviscous Stokes equations using the finite element method. The focus is on formulations by exploiting the incompressibility constraint which leads to partly decoupled formulations and, consequently, to fewer nonzero entries in the corresponding stiffness matrix which can help to significantly accelerate the computations. The authors propose a new approach that is consistent with the stress-divergence formulation and preserves the decoupling advantages of the velocity gradient-divergence formulation in isoviscous subdomains. The modification is equivalent to locally changing the discretization stencils at interfaces or boundaries. Hence, the more expensive discretization is of lower complexity, making the additional computational cost in large scale simulations negligible. The stability and error estimates are derived and justified numerically. Finally, for a test problem and a real geophysical 3D example, it is shown that in a massively parallel setup the multigrid solution of the resulting discrete systems is faster than for the classical stress-divergence formulation.