A two-grid method with expanded mixed element for nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations

Expanded mixed finite element approximation of nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations is discussed. The equations considered here are used to model the hydrologic and bio-geochemical phenomena. To linearize the mixed-method equations, we use a two-grid method involving a small nonlinear system on a coarse gird of size H and a linear system on a fine grid of size h. Error estimates are derived which demonstrate that the error is O(Δt + hk+1 + H2k+2−d/2) (k ≥ 1), where k is the degree of the approximating space for the primary variable and d is the spatial dimension. The above estimates are useful for determining an appropriate H for the coarse grid problems.