A decoupled, unconditionally energy stable and charge-conservative finite element method for inductionless magnetohydrodynamic equations

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a decoupled, unconditionally energy stable and charge-conservative finite element method for the inductionless magnetohydrodynamic equations. The time marching is combined with a first order semi-implicit Euler scheme, a first order perturbation term and some delicate implicit-explicit treatments for coupling terms. The finite element discretization is based on mixed conforming elements, where the hydrodynamic unknowns are approximated by stable finite element pairs, and the current density and electric potential are discretized by divergence-conforming face elements and discontinuous volume elements. This fully discrete scheme only needs to solve a linear subsystem at each time step and yields an exactly divergence-free current density directly. We show that the proposed scheme is well-posed and unconditionally energy stable. Under a weak regularity hypothesis on the exact solution, we present the error estimates for velocity, current density and electric potential. Finally, the validity, reliability, and accuracy of the proposed algorithm are supported by several numerical experiments.