Design and analysis of an exactly divergence-free hybridised discontinuous Galerkin method for incompressible flows on meshes with quadrilateral cells

We generalise a hybridised discontinuous Galerkin method for incompressible flow problems to non-affine cells, showing that with a suitable element mapping the generalised method preserves a key invariance property that eludes most methods, namely that any irrotational component of the prescribed force is exactly balanced by the pressure gradient and does not affect the velocity field. This invariance property can be preserved in the discrete problem if the incompressibility constraint is satisfied in a sufficiently strong sense. We derive sufficient conditions to guarantee discretely divergence-free functions are exactly divergence-free and give examples of divergence-free finite elements on meshes with triangular, quadrilateral, tetrahedral, or hexahedral cells generated by a (possibly non-affine) map from their respective reference cells. In the case of quadrilateral cells, we prove an optimal error estimate for the velocity field that does not depend on the pressure approximation. Our analysis is supported by numerical results. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).