A Tangential and Penalty-Free Finite Element Method for the Surface Stokes Problem

DOI10.1137/23M1583995arXiv2307.01435OpenAlexW4391229485WikidataQ129338938 ScholiaQ129338938MaRDI QIDQ6154536FDOQ6154536

Authors: Alan Demlow, Michael Neilan 

Publication date: 15 February 2024

Published in: SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Surface Stokes and Navier-Stokes equations are used to model fluid flow on surfaces. They have attracted significant recent attention in the numerical analysis literature because approximation of their solutions poses significant challenges not encountered in the Euclidean context. One challenge comes from the need to simultaneously enforce tangentiality and $H^1$ conformity (continuity) of discrete vector fields used to approximate solutions in the velocity-pressure formulation. Existing methods in the literature all enforce one of these two constraints weakly either by penalization or by use of Lagrange multipliers. Missing so far is a robust and systematic construction of surface Stokes finite element spaces which employ nodal degrees of freedom, including MINI, Taylor-Hood, Scott-Vogelius, and other composite elements which can lead to divergence-conforming or pressure-robust discretizations. In this paper we construct surface MINI spaces whose velocity fields are tangential. They are not $H^1$-conforming, but do lie in $H(mdiv)$ and do not require penalization to achieve optimal convergence rates. We prove stability and optimal-order energy-norm convergence of the method and demonstrate optimal-order convergence of the velocity field in $L_2$ via numerical experiments. The core advance in the paper is the construction of nodal degrees of freedom for the velocity field. This technique also may be used to construct surface counterparts to many other standard Euclidean Stokes spaces, and we accordingly present numerical experiments indicating optimal-order convergence of nonconforming tangential surface Taylor-Hood $mathbb{P}^2-mathbb{P}^1$ elements.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01435

zbMATH Keywords

finite element methodMINI elementsurface Stokes equation

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

PDEs in connection with fluid mechanics (35Q35) Stability and convergence of numerical methods for boundary value problems involving PDEs (65N12) Error bounds for boundary value problems involving PDEs (65N15) Finite element, Rayleigh-Ritz and Galerkin methods for boundary value problems involving PDEs (65N30) Stokes and related (Oseen, etc.) flows (76D07)

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