Conformal Finite Element Methods for Nonlinear Rosenau-Burgers-Biharmonic Models

Abstract: We present a novel and comparative analysis of finite element discretizations for a nonlinear Rosenau-Burgers model including a biharmonic term. We analyze both continuous and mixed finite element approaches, providing stability, existence, and uniqueness statements of the corresponding variational methods. We also obtain optimal error estimates of the semidiscrete scheme in corresponding B^ochner spaces. Finally, we construct a fully discrete scheme through a backward Euler discretization of the time derivative, and prove well-posedness statements for this fully discrete scheme. Our findings show that the mixed approach removes some theoretical impediments to analysis and is numerically easier to implement. We provide numerical simulations for the mixed formulation approach using $C^0$ Taylor-Hood finite elements on several domains. Our numerical results confirm that the algorithm has optimal convergence in accordance with the observed theoretical results.