Dra. Camaño-Valenzuela, Jessika

A new mixed variational formulation for the Navier--Stokes equations with constant density and variable viscosity depending nonlinearly on the gradient of velocity, is proposed and analyzed here. Our approach employs a technique previously applied to the stationary Boussinesq problem and to the Navier--Stokes equations with constant viscosity, which consists firstly of the introduction of a modified pseudostress tensor involving the diffusive and convective terms, and the pressure. Next, by using an equivalent statement suggested by the incompressibility condition, the pressure is eliminated, and in order to handle the nonlinear viscosity, the gradient of velocity is incorporated as an auxiliary unknown. Furthermore, since the convective term forces the velocity to live in a smaller space than usual, we overcome this difficulty by augmenting the variational formulation with suitable Galerkin-type terms arising from the constitutive and equilibrium equations, the aforementioned relation defining the additional unknown, and the Dirichlet boundary condition. The resulting augmented scheme is then written equivalently as a fixed point equation, and hence the well-known Schauder and Banach theorems, combined with classical results on bijective monotone operators, are applied to prove the unique solvability of the continuous and discrete systems. No discrete inf-sup conditions are required for the well-posedness of the Galerkin scheme, and hence arbitrary finite element subspaces of the respective continuous spaces can be utilized. In particular, given an integer K >_0, piecewise polynomials of degree _< K for the gradient of velocity, Raviart--Thomas spaces of order K for the pseudostress, and continuous piecewise polynomials of degree _< K + 1 for the velocity, constitute feasible choices. Finally, optimal a priori error estimates are derived, and several numerical results illustrating the good performance of the augmented mixed finite element method and confirming the theoretical rates of convergence are reported.

A new stress-based mixed variational formulation for the stationary Navier-Stokes equations with constant density and variable viscosity depending on the magnitude of the strain tensor, is proposed and analyzed in this work. Our approach is a natural extension of a technique applied in a recent paper by some of the authors to the same boundary value problem but with a viscosity that depends nonlinearly on the gradient of velocity instead of the strain tensor. In this case, and besides remarking that the strain-dependence for the viscosity yields a more physically relevant model, we notice that to handle this nonlinearity we now need to incorporate not only the strain itself but also the vorticity as auxiliary unknowns. Furthermore, similarly as in that previous work, and aiming to deal with a suitable space for the velocity, the variational formulation is augmented with Galerkin-type terms arising from the constitutive and equilibrium equations, the relations defining the two additional unknowns, and the Dirichlet boundary condition. In this way, and as the resulting augmented scheme can be rewritten as a fixed-point operator equation, the classical Schauder and Banach theorems together with monotone operators theory are applied to derive the well-posedness of the continuous and associated discrete schemes. In particular, we show that arbitrary finite element subspaces can be utilized for the latter, and then we derive optimal a priori error estimates along with the corresponding rates of convergence. Next, a reliable and efficient residual-based a posteriori error estimator on arbitrary polygonal and polyhedral regions is proposed. The main tools used include Raviart-Thomas and Clément interpolation operators, inverse and discrete inequalities, and the localization technique based on triangle-bubble and edge-bubble functions. Finally, several numerical essays illustrating the good performance of the method, confirming the reliability and efficiency of the a posteriori error estimator, and showing the desired behavior of the adaptive algorithm, are reported.