Spectral discretization of an unsteady flow through a porous solid

Abstract

We consider the non stationary flow of a viscous incompressible fluid in a rigid homogeneous porous medium provided with mixed boundary conditions. Since the boundary pressure can present high variations, the permeability of the medium also depends on the pressure, so that the problem is nonlinear. We propose a discretization of this equation that combines Euler's implicit scheme in time and spectral methods in space. We prove optimal a priori error estimates and present some numerical experiments which confirm the interest of the discretization.