Analysis of a splitting method for incompressible inviscid rotational flow problems

This paper is devoted to analyze a splitting method for solving incompressible inviscid rotational flows. The problem is first recast into the velocity–vorticity–pressure formulation by introducing the additional vorticity variable, and then split into three consecutive subsystems. For each subsystem, the L 2 least-squares finite element approach is applied to attain accurate numerical solutions. We show that for each time step this splitting least-squares approach exhibits an optimal rate of convergence in the H 1 norm for velocity and pressure, and a suboptimal rate in the L 2 norm for vorticity. A numerical example in two dimensions is presented, which confirms the theoretical error estimates.