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.
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.