Spectral element discretization of the vorticity, velocity and pressure formulation of the Stokes problem

We consider the Stokes problem provided with non standard boundary conditions which involve the normal component of the velocity and the tangential components of the vorticity. We write a variational formulation of this problem with three independent unknowns: the vorticity, the velocity and the pressure. Next we propose a discretization by spectral element methods which relies on this formulation. A detailed numerical analysis leads to optimal error estimates for the three unknowns and numerical experiments confirm the interest of the discretization. Mathematics Subject Classification. 35Q30, 65N35. Received: January 1st, 2006. Revised: June 13, 2006.