A multi-level discontinuous Galerkin method for solving the stationary Navier-Stokes equations (Q885311)

The authors consider the multi-level discontinuous finite element method for solving the stationary incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. On the coarsest mesh the discrete nonlinear Navier-Stokes equations are solved by using pointwise divergence free functions on each element for the velocity and continuous functions for the pressure. Subsequent approximations are generated on a succession of refined grids by solving the Newton linearized Navier-Stokes equations using piecewise polynomial functions which are provided for the multi-level discontinuous Galerkin method. The error analysis shows that when the mesh scales \(k_{j+1}=O (k^2_j), h_{j+1}=O(h^2_J)\) with \(j=0,1,\dots, J-1\) are chosen, the multi-level finite element method can save a large amount of computational time compared with the one-level finite element method.