Stabilizing the convection–diffusion–reaction equation via local problems

Abstract

This paper presents a novel two-level finite element method for convection–diffusion–reaction problems. The proposed scheme consists of a global problem and an ensemble of local problems. The boundary conditions of the local problems are provided by a global approximation of the same problem. The stability is ensured with an artificial diffusion mechanism that acts on the difference between local and global approximation, and leads to an a priori error estimate for the global solution. For the computation of the solutions, an efficient fixed-point algorithm is proposed as an alternative to the well established static condensation technique. The local solutions can be computed in parallel and enter in a communication step. This step takes place in the entire domain and consists of a mass matrix inversion only. Therefore, the overall algorithm is easy to implement and computationally inexpensive.