Comparison of 3D flow fields arising in mixed and standard unstructured finite elements

Authors:
Annamaria Mazzia;Giorgio Pini;Mario Putti;Flavio Sartoretto
Affiliations:
Dipartimento di Metodi e Modelli Matematici per le Scienze Applicate, Università di Padova, Padova, Italy;Dipartimento di Metodi e Modelli Matematici per le Scienze Applicate, Università di Padova, Padova, Italy;Dipartimento di Metodi e Modelli Matematici per le Scienze Applicate, Università di Padova, Padova, Italy;Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Venezia, Mestre, VE, Italy
Venue:
ICCS'03 Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Computational science: PartI
Year:
2003

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Abstract

Computing 3D velocity fields is an important task in subsurface water flow analysis. While Finite Element (FE) simulations generally yields accurate estimates of the head, the numerical velocity may display errors and even unphysical behavior in some parts of the domain. Theoretically, the Mixed Hybrid FE (MHFE) approach provide a more accurate approximation to the velocities. In this communication we analyze a number of 3D-flow test cases, and compare the results obtained using FE and MHFE on tetrahedral meshes. Theoretical convergence estimates are numerically verified for a few simple problems. A more complex heterogeneous test case is used to show that, even for very fine meshes, the results obtained using the two discretization approaches may differ.