this paper is to highlight some of the underlying driving analytical mechanisms. The price of a powerful tool is the effort to construct and understand it. Its successful application hinges on the realization of a number of requirements. Some space has to be reserved for a clear identification of these requirements as well as for their realization. This is also particularly important for understanding the severe obstructions, that keep us at present from readily materializing all the principally promising perspectives.

Abstract. We provide a framework for the analysis of a large class of discontinuous methods for second-order elliptic problems. It allows for the understanding and comparison of most of the discontinuous Galerkin methods that have been proposed over the past three decades for the numerical treatment of elliptic problems.

Large linear systems of saddle point type arise in a wide variety of applications throughout computational science and engineering. Due to their indefiniteness and often poor spectral properties, such linear systems represent a significant challenge for solver developers. In recent years there has been a surge of interest in saddle point problems, and numerous solution techniques have been proposed for solving this type of systems. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss a large selection of solution methods for linear systems in saddle point form, with an emphasis on iterative methods for large and sparse problems.

. In this paper, we consider the so-called "inexact Uzawa" algorithm for iteratively solving block saddle point problems. Such saddle point problems arise, for example, in finite element and finite difference discretizations of Stokes equations, the equations of elasticity and mixed finite element discretization of second order problems. We consider both the linear and nonlinear variants of the inexact Uzawa algorithm. We show that the linear method always converges as long as the preconditioners defining the algorithm are properly scaled. Bounds for the rate of convergence are provided in terms of the rate of convergence for the preconditioned Uzawa algorithm and the reduction factor corresponding to the preconditioner for the upper left hand block. In the nonlinear case, the inexact Uzawa algorithm is shown to converge provided that the nonlinear process approximating the inverse of the upper left hand block is of sufficient accuracy. Bounds for the nonlinear iteration are given in t...

Discretization and linearization of the steady-state Navier-Stokes equations gives rise to a nonsymmetric indefinite linear system of equations. In this paper, we introduce preconditioning techniques for such systems with the property that the eigenvalues of the preconditioned matrices are bounded independently of the mesh size used in the discretization. We confirm and supplement these analytic results with a series of numerical experiments indicating that Krylov subspace iterative methods for nonsymmetric systems display rates of convergence that are independent of the mesh parameter. In addition, we show that preconditioning costs can be kept small by using iterative methods for some intermediate steps performed by the preconditioner. * This work was supported by the U. S. Army Research Office under grant DAAL-0392-G0016 and the U. S. National Science Foundation under grant ASC-8958544 at the University of Maryland, and the Science and Engineering Research Council of Great Britain V...

We present an expanded mixed finite element approximation of second order elliptic problems containing a tensor coefficient. The mixed method is expanded in the sense that three variables are explicitly approximated, namely, the scalar unknown, the negative of its gradient, and its flux (the tensor coefficient times the negative gradient). The resulting linear system is a saddle point problem. In the case of the lowest order Raviart-Thomas elements on rectangular parallelepipeds, we approximate this expanded mixed method by incorporating certain quadrature rules. This enables us to write the system as a simple, cell-centered finite difference method, requiring the solution of a sparse, positive semideflnite linear system for the scalar unknown. For a general tensor coefficient, the sparsity pattern for the scalar unknown is a nine point stencil in two dimensions, and 19 points in three dimensions. Existing theory shows that the expanded mixed method gives optimal order ap- proximations in the L a and H-S-norms (and superconvergence is obtained between the La-projection of the scalar variable and its approximation). We show that these rates of convergence are retained for the finite difference method. If h denotes the maximal mesh spacing, then the optimal rate is O(h). The superconvergence rate O(h ) is obtained for the scalar unknown and rate O(h 3/) for its gradient and flux in certain discrete norms; moreover, the full O(h ) is obtained in the strict interior of the domain. Computational results illustrate these theoretical results.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and analyze a least-squares approximation to a first order system. The first order system represents a reformulation of a second order elliptic boundary value problem which may be indefinite and/or nonsymmetric. The approach taken here is novel in that the least-squares functional employed involves a discrete inner product which is related to the inner product in H −1 (Ω) (the Sobolev space of order minus one on Ω). The use of this inner product results in a method of approximation which is optimal with respect to the required regularity as well as the order of approximation even when applied to problems with low regularity solutions. In addition, the discrete system of equations which needs to be solved in order to compute the resulting approximation is easily preconditioned, thus providing an efficient method for solving the algebraic equations. The preconditioner for this discrete system only requires the construction of preconditioners for standard second order problems, a task which is well understood.

Abstract not found

Abstract. We introduce and study a new class of projection methods—namely, the velocitycorrection methods in standard form and in rotational form—for solving the unsteady incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. We show that the rotational form provides improved error estimates in terms of the H 1-norm for the velocity and of the L 2-norm for the pressure. We also show that the class of fractional-step methods introduced in [S. A. Orsag, M. Israeli, and M. Deville, J. Sci. Comput., 1 (1986), pp. 75–111] and [K. E. Karniadakis, M. Israeli, and S. A. Orsag, J. Comput. Phys., 97 (1991), pp. 414–443] can be interpreted as the rotational form of our velocity-correction methods. Thus, to the best of our knowledge, our results provide the first rigorous proof of stability and convergence of the methods in those papers. We also emphasize that, contrary to those of the above groups, our formulations are set in the standard L 2 setting, and consequently they can be easily implemented by means of any variational approximation techniques, in particular the finite element methods. Key words. Navier–Stokes equations, projection methods, fractional-step methods, incompressibility, finite elements, spectral approximations

this paper is to discuss the a posteriori error analysis and adaptive mesh design for discontinuous Galerkin finite element approximations to systems of conservation laws. In Section 2, we introduce the model problem and formulate its discontinuous Galerkin finite element approximation. Section 3 is devoted to the derivation of weighted a posteriori error bounds for linear functionals of the solution. Finally, in Section 4 we present some numerical examples to demonstrate the performance of the resulting adaptive finite element algorithm. 2 Model problem and discretisation Given an open bounded polyhedral domain fl in lI n, n _> 1, with boundary 0fl, we consider the following problem: find u: fl --> lI m, m _> 1, such that div(u) = 0 in , (2.1) where, ,: m __> mxn is continuously differentiable. We assume that the system of conservation laws (2.1) may be supplemented by appropriate initial/boundary conditions. For example, assuming that B(u, y) := EiL1 biVu'(u) has m real eigenvalues and a complete set of linearly independent eigenvectors for all y = (yl,---, Yn) C n; then at inflow/outflow boundaries, we require that B-(u, n)(u- g) = 0, where n denotes the unit outward normal vector to 0fl, B-(u, n) is the negative part of B(u, n) and g is a (given) real-valued function. To formulate the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method (DGFEM, for short) for (2.1), we first introduce some notation. Let 7 = {n} be an admissible subdivision of fl into open element domains n; here h is a piecewise constant mesh function with h(x) = diam(n) 2 Houston e al. when x is in element n. For p Iq0, we define the following finite element space n, -- {v [L()]": vl [%(n)] " Vn }, where Pp(n) denotes the set of polynomials of degree at most p over n. Given that v [Hi(n)] m for each n...