Stable Non-symmetric Coupling of the Finite Volume Method and the Boundary Element Method for Convection-Dominated Parabolic-Elliptic Interface Problems

Abstract

Abstract Many problems in electrical engineering or fluid mechanics can be modeled by parabolic-elliptic interface problems, where the domain for the exterior elliptic problem might be unbounded. A possibility to solve this class of problems numerically is the non-symmetric coupling of finite elements (FEM) and boundary elements (BEM) analyzed in [H. Egger, C. Erath and R. Schorr, On the nonsymmetric coupling method for parabolic-elliptic interface problems, SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 56 2018, 6, 3510–3533]. If, for example, the interior problem represents a fluid, this method is not appropriate since FEM in general lacks conservation of numerical fluxes and in case of convection dominance also stability. A possible remedy to guarantee both is the use of the vertex-centered finite volume method (FVM) with an upwind stabilization option. Thus, we propose a (non-symmetric) coupling of FVM and BEM for a semi-discretization of the underlying problem. For the subsequent time discretization we introduce two options: a variant of the backward Euler method which allows us to develop an analysis under minimal regularity assumptions and the classical backward Euler method. We analyze both, the semi-discrete and the fully-discrete system, in terms of convergence and error estimates. Some numerical examples illustrate the theoretical findings and give some ideas for practical applications.