Penalty method with P1/P1 finite element approximation for the Stokes equations under slip boundary condition

Abstract: We consider the P1/P1 or P1b/P1 finite element approximations to the Stokes equations in a bounded smooth domain subject to the slip boundary condition. A penalty method is applied to address the essential boundary condition $u\cdot n = g$ on $\partial\Omega$, which avoids a variational crime and simultaneously facilitates the numerical implementation. We give $O(h^{1/2} + \epsilon^{1/2} + h/\epsilon^{1/2})$-error estimate for velocity and pressure in the energy norm, where $h$ and $\epsilon$ denote the discretization parameter and the penalty parameter, respectively. In the two-dimensional case, it is improved to $O(h + \epsilon^{1/2} + h^2/\epsilon^{1/2})$ by applying reduced-order numerical integration to the penalty term. The theoretical results are confirmed by numerical experiments.