Superconvergent pseudostress-velocity finite element methods for the Oseen and Navier-Stokes equations

We present a priori and superconvergence error estimates of mixed finite element methods for the pseudostress-velocity formulation of the Oseen equation. In particular, we derive superconvergence estimates for the velocity and a priori error estimates under unstructured grids, and obtain superconvergence results for the pseudostress under certain structured grids. A variety of numerical experiments validate the theoretical results and illustrate the effectiveness of the superconvergent recovery-based adaptive mesh refinement. It is also numerically shown that the proposed postprocessing yields apparent superconvergence in a benchmark problem for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equation.