Design and analysis of a hybridized discontinuous Galerkin method for incompressible flows on meshes with quadrilateral cells

We present and analyse a hybridized discontinuous Galerkin method for incompressible flow problems using non-affine cells, proving that it preserves a key invariance property that illudes most methods, namely that any irrotational component of the prescribed force is exactly balanced by the pressure gradient and does not influence the velocity field. This invariance property can be preserved in the discrete problem if the incompressibility constraint is satisfied in a sufficiently strong sense. We derive sufficient conditions to guarantee discretely divergence-free functions are exactly divergence-free, and give examples of divergence-free finite elements on meshes containing triangular, quadrilateral, tetrahedral, or hexahedral cells generated by a (possibly non-affine) map from their respective reference cells. In the case of quadrilateral cells, we prove an optimal error estimate for the velocity field that does not depend on the pressure approximation. Our theoretical analysis is supported by numerical results.