Analysis of the immersed boundary method for a finite element Stokes problem

Convergence results are presented for the immersed boundary (IB) method applied to a model Stokes problem. As a discretization method, we use the finite element method. First, the immersed force field is approximated using a regularized delta function. Its error in the W^{?1, p} norm is examined for 1 ≤ p < n/(n ? 1), with n representing the space dimension. Subsequently, we consider IB discretization of the Stokes problem and examine the regularization and discretization errors separately. Consequently, error estimate of order h^{1 ? α} in the W^{1, 1} × L¹ norm for the velocity and pressure is derived, where α is an arbitrary small positive number. The validity of those theoretical results is confirmed from numerical examples.