Goal-oriented space-time adaptivity for the Navier--Stokes equations based on the dual weighted residual method

Marius Paul Bruchhäuser; Nils Margenberg; Markus Bause

Goal-oriented space-time adaptivity for the Navier--Stokes equations based on the dual weighted residual method

Numerical Analysis 2026-07-01 v1

Authors: Marius Paul Bruchhäuser , Nils Margenberg , Markus Bause

Abstract

This work presents a goal-oriented a posteriori error estimator based on the Dual Weighted Residual (DWR) method together with space-time mesh adaptivity for the Navier--Stokes equations. The resulting nonlinear algebraic systems on the space-time slabs are solved by Newton's method with GMRES, preconditioned by a slab-wise geometric multigrid method. This combination yields reliable control of target quantities on computationally feasible space-time meshes together with a robust and efficient solution of the algebraic systems. The implementation is based on a MPI-parallel programming model in the deal.II library. Further ingredients are a discontinuous Galerkin discretization in time and inf-sup stable finite element pairs with discontinuous pressure on tensor-product meshes. The performance of the approach is investigated in benchmark computations with regard to accuracy, efficiency, and stability.

Keywords

Navier-Stokes equations dual weighted residual goal-oriented adaptivity space-time methods a posteriori error estimation finite element method

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.00686,
  title  = {Goal-oriented space-time adaptivity for the Navier--Stokes equations based on the dual weighted residual method},
  author = {Marius Paul Bruchhäuser and Nils Margenberg and Markus Bause},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.00686},
  year   = {2026}
}