Numerical analysis of 2D Navier--Stokes equations with nonsmooth initial value in the critical space

This paper addresses the numerical solution of the two-dimensional Navier–Stokes (NS) equations with nonsmooth initial data in the $L^2$ space, which is the critical space for the two-dimensional NS equations to be well-posed. In this case, the solutions of the NS equations exhibit certain singularities at $t=0$, e.g., the $H^s$ norm of the solution blows up as $t\to 0$ when $s>0$. To date, the best convergence result proved in the literature are first-order accuracy in both time and space for the semi-implicit Euler time-stepping scheme and divergence-free finite elements (even high-order finite elements are used), while numerical results demonstrate that second-order convergence in time and space may be achieved. Therefore, there is still a gap between numerical analysis and numerical computation for the NS equations with $L^2$ initial data. The primary challenge to realizing high-order convergence is the insufficient regularity in the solutions due to the rough initial condition and the nonlinearity of the equations. In this work, we propose a fully discrete numerical scheme that utilizes the Taylor–Hood or Stokes-MINI finite element method for spatial discretization and an implicit-explicit Runge–Kutta time-stepping method in conjunction with graded stepsizes. By employing discrete semigroup techniques, sharp regularity estimates, negative norm estimates and the $L^2$ projection onto the divergence-free Raviart–Thomas element space, we prove that the proposed scheme attains second-order convergence in both space and time. Numerical examples are presented to support the theoretical analysis. In particular, the convergence in space is at most second order even higher-order finite elements are used. This shows the sharpness of the convergence order proved in this article.