Fully decoupled, linear and positivity-preserving scheme for the chemotaxis–Stokes equations

Abstract

In this article, we develop a fully decoupled, linear and positivity-preserving finite element scheme for solving the chemotaxis–Stokes equations, which describe the biological chemotaxis phenomenon in the fluid environment. To deal with the strong coupling of the problem, we first consider a fully decoupled and linear semi-discrete scheme, in which we only need to solve several linearized sub-problems at each time step for the velocity, pressure, oxygen concentration and cell density, respectively. Then, based on the linear finite element method for the spatial discretization, the flux-corrected transport algorithm is extended to the oxygen concentration and cell density sub-problems to preserve their positivity. Finally, we show a series of numerical examples to verify its efficiency. We also find that better simulation can be obtained by regularizing the cut-off function and setting a random initial cell density in the equations.