Abstract: | The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) We show that the Fourier‐based Nonlinear Galerkin Method (NLGM) constructs suitable weak solutions to the periodic Navier–Stokes equations in three space dimensions provided the large scale/small scale cutoff is appropriately chosen. (ii) If smoothness is assumed, NLGM always outperforms the Galerkin method by a factor equal to 1 in the convergence order of the H 1‐norm for the velocity and the L2‐norm for the pressure. This is a purely linear superconvergence effect resulting from standard elliptic regularity and holds independently of the nature of the boundary conditions (whether periodicity or no‐slip BC is enforced). © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2008 |