High order Lagrange-Galerkin methods for the conservative formulation of the advection-diffusion equation

Abstract: We introduce in this paper the numerical analysis of high order both in time and space Lagrange-Galerkin methods for the conservative formulation of the advection-diffusion equation. As time discretization scheme we consider the Backward Differentiation Formulas up to order $q=5$. The development and analysis of the methods are performed in the framework of time evolving finite elements presented in C. M. Elliot and T. Ranner, IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis \textbf{41}, 1696-1845 (2021). The error estimates show through their dependence on the parameters of the equation the existence of different regimes in the behavior of the numerical solution; namely, in the diffusive regime, that is, when the diffusion parameter $\mu$ is large, the error is $O(h^{k+1}+\Delta t^{q})$, whereas in the advective regime, $\mu \ll 1$, the convergence is $O(\min (h^{k},\frac{h^{k+1} }{\Delta t})+\Delta t^{q})$. It is worth remarking that the error constant does not have exponential $\mu ^{-1}$ dependence.