Viscosity in error upper bound for a consistent splitting scheme of the Navier-Stokes equations

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of viscosity in the error upper bounds of a consistent splitting scheme for the Navier-Stokes equations proposed by Huang and Shen [5]. In their original analysis the viscosity is fixed to unity. By following and extending their proof methodology while keeping the viscosity symbolic, we obtain an H1 velocity error bound that contains negative powers of viscosity, indicating that the scheme is not robust as viscosity tends zero. To establish this bound we refine a theorem in [8] on the constant in the Stokes pressure estimate, which is crucial to the error analysis. A targeted numerical experiment based on a perturbation of the Kovasznay flow corroborates this analytical prediction: the scheme of [5] blows up at high Reynolds number, and a comparison with a fully implicit Newton solver and with the time-dependent Stokes counterpart of the same scheme localizes the failure to the explicit treatment of the convection term.