A comparative study of GLS finite elements with velocity and pressure equally interpolated for solving incompressible viscous flows

A comparative study of the bi‐linear and bi‐quadratic quadrilateral elements and the quadratic triangular element for solving incompressible viscous flows is presented. These elements make use of the stabilized finite element formulation of the Galerkin/least‐squares method to simulate the flows, with the pressure and velocity fields interpolated with equal orders. The tangent matrices are explicitly derived and the Newton–Raphson algorithm is employed to solve the resulting nonlinear equations. The numerical solutions of the classical lid‐driven cavity flow problem are obtained for Reynolds numbers between 1000 and 20 000 and the accuracy and converging rate of the different elements are compared. The influence on the numerical solution of the least square of incompressible condition is also studied. The numerical example shows that the quadratic triangular element exhibits a better compromise between accuracy and converging rate than the other two elements. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.