A novel characteristic expanded mixed method for reaction-convection-diffusion problems (Q2375637)

Summary: A novel characteristic expanded mixed finite element method is proposed and analyzed for reaction-convection-diffusion problems. The diffusion term \(\nabla \cdot (a(\mathbf{x}, t)\nabla u)\) is discretized by the novel expanded mixed method, whose gradient belongs to the square integrable space instead of the classical \(\mathbf{H}(\text{div}; \Omega)\) space and the hyperbolic part \(d(\mathbf{x})(\partial u/\partial t) + \text\textbf{c}(\text\textbf{x}, t) \cdot \nabla u\) is handled by the characteristic method. For a priori error estimates, some important lemmas based on the novel expanded mixed projection are introduced. The fully discrete error estimates based on backward Euler scheme are obtained. Moreover, the optimal a priori error estimates in \(L^2\)- and \(H^1\)-norms for the scalar unknown \(u\) and a priori error estimates in \((L^2)^2\)-norm for its gradient \(\lambda\) and its flux \(\sigma\) (the coefficients times the negative gradient) are derived. Finally, a numerical example is provided to verify our theoretical results.