Analysis and Finite Element Approximation of a Nonlinear Stationary Stokes Problem Arising in Glaciology.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Numerical Analysis Volume 2011, Article ID 164581, 24 pages doi:10.1155/2011/164581 Research Article Analysis and Finite Element Approximation of a Nonlinear Stationary Stokes Problem Arising in Glaciology Guillaume Jouvet1, 2 and Jacques Rappaz2 1 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Free University of Berlin, 14195 Berlin, Germany 2 Chair of Numerical Analysis and Simulation, EPFL, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland Correspondence should be addressed to Guillaume Jouvet, guillaume.jouvet@fu-berlin.de Received 13 September 2011; Accepted 25 October 2011 Academic Editor: Michele Benzi Copyright q 2011 G. Jouvet and J. Rappaz. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The aim of this paper is to study a nonlinear stationary Stokes problem with mixed boundary conditions that describes the ice velocity and pressure fields of grounded glaciers under Glen’s flow law. Using convex analysis arguments, we prove the existence and the uniqueness of a weak solution. A finite element method is applied with approximation spaces that satisfy the inf-sup condition, and a priori error estimates are established by using a quasinorm technique. Several algorithms including Newton’s method are proposed to solve the nonlinearity of the Stokes problem and are proved to be convergent. Our results are supported by numerical convergence studies. 1. Introduction In this paper we consider a model problem that is commonly used by glaciologists to compute the motion of glaciers. Ice is assumed to be an incompressible non-Newtonian flu