A weak Galerkin finite element method for the Oseen equations

Abstract

In this paper, a weak Galerkin finite element method for the Oseen equations of incompressible fluid flow is proposed and investigated. This method is based on weak gradient and divergence operators which are designed for the finite element discontinuous functions. Moreover, by choosing the usual polynomials of degree i ≥ 1 for the velocity and polynomials of degree i − 1 for the pressure and enhancing the polynomials of degree i − 1 on the interface of a finite element partition for the velocity, this new method has a lot of attractive computational features: more general finite element partitions of arbitrary polygons or polyhedra with certain shape regularity, fewer degrees of freedom and parameter free. Stability and error estimates of optimal order are obtained by defining a weak convection term. Finally, a series of numerical experiments are given to show that this method has good stability and accuracy for the Oseen problem.