Analysis of a Stokes interface problem (Q2491135)

The authors carry out a subtle numerical analysis of the stationary Stokes problem with piecewise constant viscosity coefficient. For the corresponding weak formulation they prove a well-posedness result with uniformly bounded constant with respect to the jump in the viscosity coefficient. The finite element discretization is based on a family of pairs of conforming finite element spaces. The authors also prove an infsup stability result and a discretization error bound, both with constants independent of viscosity and mesh size. A section is devoted to the analysis of convergence properties of iterative solvers for the discretized problem. In order to underline the robustness of Uzawa and preconditioned MINRES methods, the authors provide the results of some numerical experiments.