A New Projection-Based Stabilized Virtual Element Method for the Stokes Problem

We propose and analyze a stabilized virtual element method for the Stokes problem on polytopal meshes. We employ the C^0 continuous arbitrary “equal-order” virtual element pairs to approximate both velocity and pressure, and develop a projection-based stabilization term to circumvent the discrete inf-sup condition, then we obtain the corresponding error estimates. The presented method involves neither the projection of the second derivative nor additional coupling terms, and it is parameter-free. In particularly, for the lowest-order case on triangular (tetrahedral) meshes the stabilized method introduced by Bochev et al. (SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 44: 82–101, 2006) is a special case of our method up to an approximation of the load term. Furthermore, numerical results are shown to confirm the theoretical predictions.