In this article, we mainly consider a first order penalty finite element method (PFEM) for the 2D/3D unsteady incompressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations. The penalty method applies a penalty term to relax the constraint "∇·u=0", which allows us to transform the saddle point problem into two smaller problems to solve. The Euler semi-implicit scheme is based on a first order backward difference formula for time discretization and semi-implicit treatments for nonlinear terms. It is worth mentioning that the error estimates of the fully discrete PFEM are rigorously derived, which depend on the penalty parameter ϵ, the time-step size τ, and the mesh size h. Finally, two numerical tests show that our scheme is effective.
Keywords: LBB condition; MHD equations; PFEM; error estimates; semi-implicit scheme.