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Locally Conservative Fluxes For The Continuous Galerkin Method, Bernardo Cockburn, Jay Gopalakrishnan, Haiying Wang

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

The standard continuous Galerkin (CG) finite element method for second order elliptic problems suffers from its inability to provide conservative flux approximations, a much needed quantity in many applications. We show how to overcome this shortcoming by using a two step postprocessing. The first step is the computation of a numerical flux trace defined on element inter- faces and is motivated by the structure of the numerical traces of discontinuous Galerkin methods. This computation is non-local in that it requires the solution of a symmetric positive definite system, but the system is well conditioned independently of mesh size, so it …