Robust error estimates in weak norms for advection dominated transport problems with rough data
Provides rigorous error bounds for numerical simulations of mixing problems, which is important for computational fluid dynamics and environmental modeling.
The paper derives a posteriori and a priori error estimates for finite element solutions of advection-dominated transport problems with rough, multiscale velocity fields. The estimates are robust, independent of the Péclet number and solution regularity.
We consider mixing problems in the form of transient convection--diffusion equations with a velocity vector field with multiscale character and rough data. We assume that the velocity field has two scales, a coarse scale with slow spatial variation, which is responsible for advective transport and a fine scale with small amplitude that contributes to the mixing. For this problem we consider the estimation of filtered error quantities for solutions computed using a finite element method with symmetric stabilization. A posteriori error estimates and a priori error estimates are derived using the multiscale decomposition of the advective velocity to improve stability. All estimates are independent both of the Péclet number and of the regularity of the exact solution.