An adaptive SUPG method for evolutionary convection–diffusion equations

An adaptive algorithm for the numerical simulation of time-dependent convection–diffusion–reaction equations will be proposed and studied. The algorithm allows the use of the natural extension of any error estimator for the steady-state problem for controlling local refinement and coarsening. The main idea consists in considering the SUPG solution of the evolutionary problem as the SUPG solution of a particular steady-state convection–diffusion problem with data depending on the computed solution. The application of the error estimator is based on a heuristic argument by considering a certain term to be of higher order. This argument is supported in the one-dimensional case by numerical analysis. In the numerical studies, particularly the residual-based error estimator from [18] will be applied, which has proved to be robust in the SUPG norm. The effectivity of this error estimator will be studied and the numerical results (accuracy of the solution, fineness of the meshes) will be compared with results obtained by utilizing the adaptive algorithm proposed in [5].