A Doubly Adaptive Penalty Method for the Navier Stokes Equations

Abstract

We develop, analyze and test adaptive penalty parameter methods. We prove unconditional stability for velocity when adapting the penalty parameter, $ε,$ and stability of the velocity time derivative under a condition on the change of the penalty parameter, $ε(t_{n+1})-ε(t_n)$. The analysis and tests show that adapting $ε(t_{n+1})$ in response to $\nabla\cdot u(t_n)$ removes the problem of picking $ε$ and yields good approximations for the velocity. We provide error analysis and numerical tests to support these results. We supplement the adaptive-$ε$ method by also adapting the time-step. The penalty parameter $ε$ and time-step are adapted independently. We further compare first, second and variable order time-step algorithms. Accurate recovery of pressure remains an open problem.