A comparison of uniformly convergent difference schemes for two- dimensional convection diffusion problems (Q1208881)

The authors consider the Dirichlet problem for the singular linear elliptic equation \(\varepsilon\Delta u+ a_ 1(x)u_ x + a_ 2(y)u_ y - bu = f\), \(\varepsilon \to 0\) on the square \((x,y) \in (0,1) \times (0,1)\). This problem may be viewed as modeling the Navier-Stokes equations or the electron and hole continuity equations for large values of the Reynolds or Hartmann number, respectively. After the choice of an appropriate energy norm which is stronger than the discrete \(L^ 2\)-norm, some difference schemes are derived by means of Galerkin and Petrov-Galerkin finite element methods via spline technique. It is remarkable that these schemes are defined on a uniform mesh which does not follow the characteristics of the reduced hyperbolic problem (\(\varepsilon = 0\)). The authors show that in the constructed norm the schemes obtained are \(O(h^{1/2})\) accurate uniformly in the perturbation parameter \(\varepsilon\), where \(h\) is the mesh width. Finally, the numerical performance of the proposed method is compared to that of the classical Il'in's finite difference scheme.