A comparative study of the discontinuous Galerkin and continuous SUPG finite element methods for computation of viscoelastic flows (Q1371751)

We compare the performance of the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method and the continuous streamline upwind Petrov-Galerkin (SUPG) method in the computation of steady viscoelastic flows. For the continuous SUPG method, it is necessary to include the elastic-viscous-split-stress (EVSS) formulation to satisfy the compatibility requirement on the velocity-stress interpolation (SUPG/EVSS), while for the discontinuous Galerkin method both the pure mixed formulation (DG/MIX) and the EVSS formulation (DG/EVSS) have been tested. We first examine a benchmark smooth problem, i.e. the steady flow of an upper convected Maxwell fluid around a sphere falling along the axis of a cylindrical tube, by using high-order finite element approximation. DG/MIX is found not to be a stable discretization in this problem, its limiting Weissenberg number decreases with increasing the interpolation order; on the other hand, DG/EVSS is an accurate and stable algorithm, its solution converges as the approximation order increases (the so-called \(p\)-convergence) and it produces almost identical stress boundary layers to that of the SUPG/EVSS algorithm at a Weissenberg number as high as 2.0. To explore benefits of the discontinuous interpolation for the stress in the DG method, we further examine two benchmark problems with stress singularities by using low-order interpolations on sufficiently fine meshes.