The Stability and Convergence of Fully Discrete Galerkin-Galerkin FEMs for Porous Medium Flows

The paper is concerned with the unconditional stability and error estimates of fully discrete Galerkin-Galerkin FEMs for the equations of incompressible miscible flows in porous media. We prove that the optimal L2 error estimates hold without any time-step (convergence) conditions, while all previous works require certain time-step restrictions. Theoretical analysis is based on a splitting of the error into two parts: the error from the time discretization of the PDEs and the error from the finite element discretization of the corresponding time-discrete PDEs, which was proposed in our previous work [26, 27]. Numerical results for both two and three-dimensional flow models are presented to confirm our theoretical analysis.