Vivette Girault

Navier–Stokes equations are one of the most impactful techniques for modeling physical flow phenomena. The coupling of velocity and pressure, along with the nonlinearity, is a challenge for the mathematical and numerical analysis of these equations. This self-contained book provides a thorough theoretical study of finite element methods for solving incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, which model ?ow of incompressible Newtonian ?uids and are used in many practical applications. It focuses on efficient and widely used finite element methods that are well adapted to large-scale simulations. In this revised and expanded edition of Girault and Raviart's 1986 textbook Finite Element Methods for Navier–Stokes Equations (Springer-Verlag), readers will find rigorous proof of stability and convergence, analysis of practical algorithms, and a stand-alone chapter on finite element methods that is applicable to a large range of PDEs. In addition to the basic theoretical analysis, this book covers up-to-date finite element discretizations of incompressible Navier–Stokes equations; a variety of numerical algorithms used in the computer implementation of Navier–Stokes equations and numerical experiments; standard and nonstandard boundary conditions and their numerical discretizations via the finite element methods; and conforming and nonconforming finite elements, as well as their stability and instability.

The material covered by this book has been taught by one of the authors in a post-graduate course on Numerical Analysis at the University Pierre et Marie Curie of Paris. It is an extended version of a previous text (cf. Girault & Raviart [32J) published in 1979 by Springer-Verlag in its series: Lecture Notes in Mathematics. In the last decade, many engineers and mathematicians have concentrated their efforts on the finite element solution of the Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible flows. The purpose of this book is to provide a fairly comprehen­ sive treatment of the most recent developments in that field. To stay within reasonable bounds, we have restricted ourselves to the case of stationary prob­ lems although the time-dependent problems are of fundamental importance. This topic is currently evolving rapidly and we feel that it deserves to be covered by another specialized monograph. We have tried, to the best of our ability, to present a fairly exhaustive treatment of the finite element methods for inner flows. On the other hand however, we have entirely left out the subject of exterior problems which involve radically different techniques, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. Also, we have neither discussed the implemen­ tation of the finite element methods presented by this book, nor given any explicit numerical result. This field is extensively covered by Peyret & Taylor [64J and Thomasset [82].