An ultraweak DPG method for viscoelastic fluids

Abstract: We explore a vexing benchmark problem for viscoelastic fluid flows with the discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin (DPG) finite element method of Demkowicz and Gopalakrishnan [1,2]. In our analysis, we develop an intrinsic a posteriori error indicator which we use for adaptive mesh generation. The DPG method is useful for the problem we consider because the method is inherently stable---requiring no stabilization of the linearized discretization in order to handle the advective terms in the model. Because stabilization is a pressing issue in these models, this happens to become a very useful property of the method which simplifies our analysis. This built-in stability at all length scales and the a posteriori error indicator additionally allows for the generation of parameter-specific meshes starting from a common coarse initial mesh. A DPG discretization always produces a symmetric positive definite stiffness matrix. This feature allows us to use the most efficient direct solvers for all of our computations. We use the Camellia finite element software package [3,4] for all of our analysis.