An adaptive algorithm for the Crank–Nicolson scheme applied to a time-dependent convection–diffusion problem

An a posteriori upper bound is derived for the nonstationary convection–diffusion problem using the Crank–Nicolson scheme and continuous, piecewise linear stabilized finite elements with large aspect ratio. Following Lozinski et al. (2009) [13], a quadratic time reconstruction is used.A space and time adaptive algorithm is developed to ensure the control of the relative error in the L²(H¹) norm. Numerical experiments illustrating the efficiency of this approach are reported; it is shown that the error indicator is of optimal order with respect to both the mesh size and the time step, even in the convection dominated regime and in the presence of boundary layers.