We consider discretizations for reaction-diffusion systems with nonlinear
diffusion in two space dimensions. The applied model allows to handle heterogeneous
materials and uses the chemical potentials of the involved species as primary variables.
We propose an implicit Voronoi finite volume discretization on regular Delaunay
meshes that allows to prove uniform, mesh-independent global upper and lower L1
bounds for the chemical potentials. These bounds provide the main step for a convergence
analysis for the full discretized nonlinear evolution problem. The fundamental
ideas are energy estimates, a discrete Moser iteration and the use of discrete
Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequalities. For the proof of the Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequalities
we exploit that the discrete Voronoi finite volume gradient norm in 2d coincides
with the gradient norm of continuous piecewise linear finite elements.
Recent research has shown that
in some practically relevant situations like multi-physics flows[11]
divergence-free mixed finite elements may have a significantly
smaller discretization error than standard non-divergence-free
mixed finite elements. In order to judge the overall performance of
divergence-free mixed finite elements, we
investigate linear solvers for the saddle point linear systems arising in $((P_k)^d,P_{k-1}^{disc})$ Scott-Vogelius finite element implementations of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. We investigate both direct and iterative solver methods.
Due to discontinuous pressure elements in the case of Scott-Vogelius elements, considerably more solver strategies seem to deliver promising results than in the case of standard mixed finite elements like
Taylor-Hood elements. For direct methods, we extend recent preliminary work using sparse banded solvers on the penalty method formulation to finer meshes, and discuss extensions. For iterative methods, we test augmented Lagrangian and H-LU preconditioners with GMRES, on both full and statically condensed systems.
Several numerical experiments are provided that show these classes of solvers are well suited for use with Scott-Vogelius elements, and could deliver an interesting overall performance in several applications.
Grad-div stabilization has been proved to be a very useful tool in discretizations
of incompressible flow problems. Standard error analysis for inf-sup stable conforming pairs of
finite element spaces predicts that the stabilization parameter should be optimally chosen
to be $\mathcal O(1)$. This paper revisits this choice for the Stokes equations on the basis
of minimizing the $H^1(\Omega)$ error of the velocity and the $L^2(\Omega)$ error of the pressure.
It turns out, by applying a refined error analysis, that the optimal parameter choice is more subtle
than known so far in the literature. It depends on the used norm,
the solution, the family of finite
element spaces, and the type of mesh. Depending on the situation, the
optimal
stabilization parameter might range from being very small to very large.
The analytic results
are supported by numerical examples.
In incompressible flows with vanishing
normal velocities at the boundary, irrotational forces in the momentum
equations should be balanced
completely by the pressure gradient.
Unfortunately, nearly all available discretization methods for incompressible flows violate this property.
The origin of the problem is that discrete velocity approximations
of incompressible flows are usually not
divergence-free. Hence, the use of divergence-free velocity reconstructions is
proposed wherever an $L^2$ scalar product appears in the discrete
variational formulation.
The approach is illustrated and applied to a nonconforming MAC-like discretization for unstructured Delaunay grids.
It is numerically demonstrated that a divergence-free velocity reconstruction based on the lowest-order Raviart-Thomas element
increases the robustness and accuracy of an existing convergent discretization, when irrotational forces appear in the momentum equations.
We apply the general framework developed by John et al. in [15] to
analyze the convergence of multi-level methods for mixed finite element
discretizations of the generalized Stokes problem using the
Scott-Vogelius element. Having in mind that semi-implicit operator
splitting schemes for the Navier-Stokes equations lead to this class of
problems, we take symmetric stabilization operators into account. The use
of the class of Scott-Vogelius elements seems to be promising since
discretely divergence-free functions are pointwise divergence-free.
However, to satisfy the Ladyzhenskaya-Babuska-Brezzi stability
condition, we have to deal in the multi-grid analysis with non-nested
families of meshes which are derived from nested macro element
triangulations.
We investigate the convergence of an implicit Voronoi finite volume
method for reaction-diffusion problems including nonlinear diffusion
in two space dimensions. The model allows to handle heterogeneous
materials and uses the chemical potentials of the involved species as
primary variables. The numerical scheme uses boundary conforming Delaunay
meshes and preserves positivity and the dissipative property of the
continuous system. Starting from a result on the global stability of
the scheme (uniform, mesh-independent global upper and lower bounds),
we prove strong convergence of the chemical activities and their gradients
to a weak solution of the continuous problem. In order to illustrate the
preservation of qualitative properties by the numerical scheme, we present
a long-term simulation of the Michaelis-Menten-Henri system. Especially,
we investigate the decay properties of the relative free energy and the
evolution of the dissipation rate over several magnitudes of time, and
obtain experimental orders of convergence for these quantities.
We introduce a new operator for stabilizing error that arises from the weak enforcement of mass conservation in finite element simulations of incompressible flow problems. We show this new operator has a similar positive effect on velocity error as the well-known and very successful grad-div stabilization operator, but the new operator is more attractive from an implementation standpoint because it yields a sparser block structure matrix. That is, while grad-div produces fully coupled block matrices (i.e. block-full), the matrices arising from the new operator are block-upper triangular in two dimensions, and in three dimensions the 2,1 and 3,1 blocks are empty. Moreover, the diagonal blocks of the new operator's matrices are identical to those of grad-div. We provide error estimates and numerical examples for finite element simulations with the new operator, which reveals the significant improvement in accuracy it can provide. Solutions found using the new operator are also compared to those using usual grad-div stabilization, and in all cases, solutions are found to be very similar.
According to the Helmholtz decomposition,
the irrotational parts of the momentum balance equations of
the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are balanced by the
pressure gradient.
Unfortunately, nearly all mixed methods for incompressible flows
violate this fundamental property, resulting in the well-known
numerical instability of poor mass conservation.
The origin of this problem is the
lack of $L^2$-orthogonality between discretely divergence-free velocities
and irrotational vector fields.
In order to cure this,
a new variational crime using divergence-free
velocity reconstructions is proposed.
Applying lowest order Raviart-Thomas velocity reconstructions
to the nonconforming Crouzeix-Raviart element
allows to construct
a cheap flow discretization for general 2d and 3d
simplex meshes that possesses the same
advantageous robustness properties like divergence-free flow
solvers.
In the Stokes case,
optimal a-priori error estimates for the velocity gradients
and the pressure are derived. Moreover, the discrete velocity
is independent of the continuous pressure.
Several detailed linear and nonlinear
numerical examples illustrate the theoretical findings.