A Mixed Finite Element Method for Stationary Magneto-Heat Coupling System with Variable Coefficients

Entropy (Basel). 2022 Jun 30;24(7):912. doi: 10.3390/e24070912.

Abstract

In this article, a mixed finite element method for thermally coupled, stationary incompressible MHD problems with physical parameters dependent on temperature in the Lipschitz domain is considered. Due to the variable coefficients of the MHD model, the nonlinearity of the system is increased. A stationary discrete scheme based on the coefficients dependent temperature is proposed, in which the magnetic equation is approximated by Nédélec edge elements, and the thermal and Navier-Stokes equations are approximated by the mixed finite elements. We rigorously establish the optimal error estimates for velocity, pressure, temperature, magnetic induction and Lagrange multiplier with the hypothesis of a low regularity for the exact solution. Finally, a numerical experiment is provided to illustrate the performance and convergence rates of our numerical scheme.

Keywords: error analysis; magnetohydrodynamics; mixed element method; partial differential equations; stationary flows; uniqueness; variable coefficients.

Grants and funding

The first author was supported by the Shandong Province Natural Science Foundation ZR2021QA054 and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation 2021M691951. The third author was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos 11871467, 12161141017).