In this paper we introduce and analyze a Banach spaces-based approach yielding a fully-mixed finite element method for numerically solving the stationary chemotaxis-Navier-Stokes problem. This is a nonlinear coupled model representing the biological process given by the cell movement, driven by either an internal or an external chemical signal, within an incompressible fluid. In addition to the velocity and pressure of the fluid, the velocity gradient and the Bernouilli-type stress tensor are introduced as further unknowns, which allows to eliminate the pressure from the equations and compute it afterwards via a postprocessing formula. In turn, besides the cell density and the chemical signal concentration, the pseudostress associated with the former and the gradient of the latter are introduced as auxiliary unknowns as well. The resulting continuous formulation, posed in suitable Banach spaces, consists of a coupled system of three saddle point-type problems, each one of them perturbed with trilinear forms that depend on data and the unknowns of the other two. The well-posedness of it is analyzed by means of a fixed-point strategy, so that the classical Banach theorem, along with the Babuška-Brezzi theory in Banach spaces, allow to conclude, under a smallness assumption on the data, the existence of a unique solution. Adopting an analogue approach for the associated Galerkin scheme, and under suitable hypotheses on arbitrary finite element subspaces employed, we apply the Brouwer and Banach theorems to show existence and then uniqueness of the discrete solution. General a priori error estimates, including those for the postprocessed pressure, are also derived. Next, a specific set of finite element subspaces satisfying the required stability conditions, and yielding approximate local conservation of momentum, is introduced, which, given an integer
, is defined in terms of Raviart-Thomas spaces of order k and piecewise polynomials of degree ≤k only. The respective rates of convergence of the resulting Galerkin method are then provided. Finally, several numerical experiments confirming the latter and illustrating the good performance of the method, are reported.