A mixed discontinuous Galerkin method with symmetric stress for Brinkman problem based on the velocity–pseudostress formulation

Abstract

The Brinkman equations can be regarded as a combination of the Stokes and Darcy equations which model transitions between the fast flow in channels (governed by Stokes equations) and the slow flow in porous media (governed by Darcy’s law). The numerical challenge for this model is the designing of a numerical scheme which is stable for both the Stokes-dominated (high permeability) and the Darcy-dominated (low permeability) equations. In this paper, we solve the Brinkman model in n dimensions (n=2,3) by using the mixed discontinuous Galerkin (MDG) method, which meets this challenge. This MDG method is based on the pseudostress–velocity formulation and uses a discontinuous piecewise polynomial pair P̲k+1S-Pk(k≥0), where the stress field is symmetric. The main unknowns are the pseudostress and the velocity, whereas the pressure is easily recovered through a simple postprocessing. A key step in the analysis is to establish the parameter-robust inf–sup stability through specific parameter-dependent norms at both continuous and discrete levels. Therefore, the stability results presented here are uniform with respect to the permeability. Thanks to the parameter-robust stability analysis, we obtain optimal error estimates for the stress in broken H̲(div)-norm and velocity in L2-norm. Furthermore, the L̲2 error estimate for pseudostress is derived under certain conditions. Finally, numerical experiments are provided to support the theoretical results and to show the robustness, accuracy, and flexibility of the MDG method.