A Banach spaces-based fully mixed virtual element method for the stationary two-dimensional Boussinesq equations

Abstract

In this paper we extend recent results obtained for the Navier–Stokes equations to propose and analyze a new fully mixed virtual element method (mixed-VEM) for the stationary two-dimensional Boussinesq equations appearing in non-isothermal flow phenomena. The model consists of a Navier–Stokes type system, modeling the velocity and the pressure of the fluid, coupled to an advection-diffusion equation for the temperature. The variational formulation is based on the introduction of the additional unknowns given by a modified pseudostress tensor, which depends on the pressure, and the diffusive and convective terms of the fluid, and the pseudoheat vector, which involves the temperature, its gradient, and the velocity. As a consequence of the former, the pressure is eliminated from the system, but computed afterwards via a post-processing formula. In turn, for the Galerkin approximation we follow the approach employed in a previous work introducing for the first time an Lp spaces-based mixed-VEM for the Navier–Stokes equations, and couple it with a similar mixed-VEM for the convection–diffusion equation modeling the temperature. The solvability analysis of the resulting coupled discrete scheme is carried out by using appropriate fixed-point arguments, along with the discrete versions of the Babuška–Brezzi theory and the Banach-Nečas-Babuška theorem, both in subspaces of Banach spaces. The first Strang lemma is applied to derive the a priori error estimates for the virtual element solution as well as for the fully computable approximation of the pseudostress tensor, the pseudoheat vector, and the post-processed pressure. Finally, several numerical results, illustrating the performance of the mixed-VEM scheme and confirming the rates of convergence predicted by the theory, are reported.