A posteriori error analysis of mixed finite element approximations to quasi-Newtonian incompressible flows

Abstract

We develop the a posteriori error analysis of mixed finite element approximations of a general family of steady, viscous, incompressible quasi-Newtonian fluids in a bounded Lipschitz domain; the family includes degenerate models such as the power-law model, as well as non-degenerate ones such as the Carreau model. The unified theoretical framework developed herein yields residual-based a posteriori bounds which measure the error in the approximations of the velocity and the pressure.