Flexible goal-oriented adaptivity for higher-order space-time discretizations of transport problems with coupled flow

Abstract: In this work, a flexible higher-order space-time adaptive finite element approximation of convection-dominated transport with coupled fluid flow is developed and studied. Convection-dominated transport is a challenging subproblem in poromechanics in which coupled transport with flow, chemical reaction and mechanical response in porous media is considered. Key ingredients are the arbitrary degree discontinuous Galerkin time discretization of the primal and dual problems for the Dual Weighted Residual (DWR) approach, an a posteriori error estimation for the transport problem coupled with flow and its implementation in an advanced software architecture. The error estimate allows the separation of the temporal and spatial discretization error contributions which facilitates the simultaneous adjustment of the time and space mesh. The performance of the approach and its software implementation is studied by numerical convergence examples as well as an example of physical interest for convection-dominated cases.