\(H(\operatorname{div})\) conforming methods for the rotation form of the incompressible fluid equations (Q2201568)

The authors present new \(H(\operatorname{div})\) conforming methods for incompressible flows represented using the rotation form of the equation of motion and the Bernoulli function. They provide error estimates for the associated semidiscrete method and, through numerical simulations, show better convergence performance than theoretically predicted. For the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation, they use the full version of the stress tensor to enforce the divergence free constraint with consistency. In this formulation, the grad-div stabilization term arises naturally with \(H1\) conforming, and the symmetric gradient formulation of the viscous term is recovered with \(H(\operatorname{div})\) conforming. Numerical results are used to confirm the accuracy of their formulations. With \(H1\) conforming and Taylor-Hood elements, the authors find that the use of the full stress tensor helps to reduce errors both in the velocity and the Bernoulli function. They also found that the \(H(\operatorname{div})\) conforming method does a better job in the long time structure preservation compared with classical mixed method even with the grad-div stabilization.