A multilevel finite element method in space‐time for the Navier‐Stokes problem

A multilevel finite element method in space‐time for the two‐dimensional nonstationary Navier‐Stokes problem is considered. The method is a multi‐scale method in which the fully nonlinear Navier‐Stokes problem is only solved on a single coarsest space‐time mesh; subsequent approximations are generated on a succession of refined space‐time meshes by solving a linearized Navier‐Stokes problem about the solution on the previous level. The a priori estimates and error analysis are also presented for the J‐level finite element method. We demonstrate theoretically that for an appropriate choice of space and time mesh widths: h_j ～ h, k_j ～ k, j = 2, …, J, the J‐level finite element method in space‐time provides the same accuracy as the one‐level method in space‐time in which the fully nonlinear Navier‐Stokes problem is solved on a final finest space‐time mesh. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2005