A consistent and stabilized continuous/discontinuous Galerkin method for fourth-order incompressible flow problems

This paper presents a new consistent and stabilized finite-element formulation for fourth-order incompressible flow problems. The formulation is based on the C⁰-interior penalty method, the Galerkin least-square (GLS) scheme, which assures that the formulation is weakly coercive for spaces that fail to satisfy the inf-sup condition, and considers discontinuous pressure interpolations. A stability analysis through a lemma establishes that the proposed formulation satisfies the inf-sup condition, thus confirming the robustness of the method. This lemma indicates that, at the element level, there exists an optimal or quasi-optimal GLS stability parameter that depends on the polynomial degree used to interpolate the velocity and pressure fields, the geometry of the finite element, and the fluid viscosity term. Numerical experiments are carried out to illustrate the ability of the formulation to deal with arbitrary interpolations for velocity and pressure, and to stabilize large pressure gradients.