Velocity-vorticity-pressure mixed formulation for the Kelvin–Voigt–Brinkman–Forchheimer equations

Abstract In this paper, we propose and analyze a mixed formulation for the Kelvin–Voigt–Brinkman–Forchheimer equations for unsteady viscoelastic flows in porous media. Besides the velocity and pressure, our approach introduces the vorticity as a further unknown. Consequently, we obtain a three-field mixed variational formulation, where the aforementioned variables are the main unknowns of the system. We establish the existence and uniqueness of a solution for the weak formulation, and derive the corresponding stability bounds, employing a fixed-point strategy, along with monotone operators theory and Schauder theorem. Afterwards, we introduce a semidiscrete continuous-in-time approximation based on stable Stokes elements for the velocity and pressure, and continuous or discontinuous piecewise polynomial spaces for the vorticity. Additionally, employing backward Euler time discretization, we introduce a fully discrete finite element scheme. We prove well-posedness, derive stability bounds and establish the corresponding error estimates for both schemes. We provide several numerical results verifying the theoretical rates of convergence and illustrating the performance and flexibility of the method for a range of domain configurations and model parameters.