J. Comp. Math., Volume 26.


A Mixed Finite Element Method on a Staggered Mesh for Navier-Stokes Equations

Houde Han 1, Ming Yan 1

1 Department of Mathematics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China

Revised 2007-12-4 Accepted 2008-1-3 Online 2008-10-29

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a mixed finite element method on a staggered mesh for the numerical solution of the steady state Navier-Stokes equations in which the two components of the velocity and the pressure are defined on three different meshes. This method is a conforming quadrilateral $Q_1\times Q_1-P_0$ element approximation for the Navier-Stokes equations. First-order error estimates are obtained for both the velocity and the pressure. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Key words: Mixed finite element method, Staggered mesh, Navier-Stokes equations, Error estimate.

AMS subject classifications: 35Q30, 74G15, 74S05.


Email: hhan@math.tsinghua.edu.cn, yanm@math.ucla.edu
 

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