A coupling method of new EMFE and FE for fourth-order partial differential equation of parabolic type (Q1953178)

Summary: We propose and analyze a new numerical method, called a coupling method based on a new expanded mixed finite element (EMFE) and finite element (FE), for fourth-order partial differential equation of parabolic type. We first reduce the fourth-order parabolic equation to a coupled system of second-order equations and then solve a second-order equation by FE method and approximate the other one by a new EMFE method. We find that the new EMFE method's gradient belongs to the simple square integrable \((L^2(\Omega))^2\) space, which avoids the use of the classical \(\mathbf{H}(\text{div}; \Omega )\) space and reduces the regularity requirement on the gradient solution \(\lambda = \nabla u\). For a priori error estimates based on both semidiscrete and fully discrete schemes, we introduce a new expanded mixed projection and some important lemmas. We derive the optimal a priori error estimates in \(L^2\) and \(H^1\)-norm for both the scalar unknown \(u\) and the diffusion term \(\gamma\) and a priori error estimates in \((L^2)^2\)-norm for its gradient \(\lambda\) and its flux \(\sigma\) (the coefficients times the negative gradient). Finally, we provide some numerical results to illustrate the efficiency of our method.