Convergence analysis of a fully discrete finite element method for thermally coupled incompressible MHD problems with temperature-dependent coefficients

Abstract

In this paper, we study a fully discrete finite element scheme of thermally coupled incompressible magnetohydrodynamic with temperature-dependent coefficients in Lipschitz domain. The variable coefficients in the MHD system and possible nonconvex domain may cause nonsmooth solutions. We propose a fully discrete Euler semi-implicit scheme with the magnetic equation approximated by Nédélec edge elements to capture the physical solutions. The fully discrete scheme only needs to solve one linear system at each time step and is unconditionally stable. Utilizing the stability of the numerical scheme and the compactness method, the existence of weak solution to the thermally coupled MHD model in three dimensions is established. Furthermore, the uniqueness of weak solution and the convergence of the proposed numerical method are also rigorously derived. Under the hypothesis of a low regularity for the exact solution, we rigorously establish the error estimates for the velocity, temperature and magnetic induction unconditionally in the sense that the time step is independent of the spacial mesh size.