Y. Achdou et Jl. Guermond, Convergence analysis of a finite element projection/Lagrange-Galerkin method for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, SIAM J NUM, 37(3), 2000, pp. 799-826
This paper provides a convergence analysis of a fractional-step method to c
ompute incompressible viscous flows by means of finite element approximatio
ns. In the proposed algorithm, the convection, the diffusion, and the incom
pressibility are treated in three different substeps. The convection is tre
ated first by means of a Lagrange-Galerkin technique, whereas the diffusion
and the incompressibility are treated separately in two subsequent substep
s by means of a projection method. It is shown that provided the time step,
delta t, is of O(h(d/4)), where h is the meshsize and d is the space dimen
sion (2 less than or equal to d less than or equal to 3), the proposed meth
od yields for finite time T an error of O(h(l+1) + delta t) in the L-2 norm
for the velocity and an error of O(h(l) + delta t) in the H-1 norm (or the
L-2 norm for the pressure), where l is the polynomial degree of the approx
imate velocity.