Dear community,

as the question title suggests, I'm having trouble verifying the 
convergence order of a solution scheme for the incompressible Navier-Stokes 
equations and I'm addressing this question particularly to those who are 
familiar with the verification of such a scheme.

We're currently working on a numerical solution scheme for the 
incompressible Navier-Stokes equations using Chorin's projection. 
Currently, we're using continuous Taylor-Hood elements. As mentioned in 
tutorial step-12, advection-like problems are not stable with CG methods, 
thus we're applying external stabilization, i.e. Taylor-Galerkin and 
grad-div-stabilization. The time marching scheme is chosen to be a 
semi-implicit scheme, basing on the implicit Euler scheme. We call it 
semi-implicit because we linearize the advection term, replacing the (u^* * 
nabla) u^* by (u^n * nabla) u^*.

Now, I want to verify the solution scheme with a convergence analysis for 
the flow velocity. I take the L2 error using the 
"integrate_difference(...)" function and compare the different values 
depending on the size of the time-step and the global refinement level. To 
get an error indicator, I take the root mean square over the L2 error at 
every timestep. The used function for verification is the non-trivial, 
two-dimensional solution to the incompressible Navier-Stokes (INS) 
equations made by McDermott (source) 
<https://sites.google.com/site/randymcdermott/NS_exact_soln.pdf>. Since 
this function solves the INS equations intrinsically, no modification of 
the right hand side of the equations is made. Periodic boundaries are used 
to avoid the external imposition of boundary conditions and thus another 
error source.

If I run the simulation with different timesteps at a specified global 
level, I can reproduce the expected order in time, which is one, resulting 
from the implicit Euler scheme. But if I run the simulation at different 
refinement levels with a fixed timestep, I get convergence rates which are 
not consistent. Using second order elements for the velocity space, I would 
expect a convergence order of 3 for the L2 error. But the convergence rates 
I get are jumping wildly and seem to depend on the size of the chosen 
timestep. As an exmaple using small timesteps (dt=1e-4, dx<0.2, cfl<1e-3) I 
get convergence rates of roughly 3+/-0.6 between two global levels. With 
smaller timesteps (dt=1e-3), I get rates around 1.6+/-0.2. If I take a look 
at the convergence rates at different timepoints (not the root mean square 
one) for the smallest timestep (dt=1e-4), I see that convergence rates in 
the beginning are indeed the expected ones of 3, but are changing over time.

Why is the convergence rate in space inconsistent? Am I missing some 
crucial point?

Best regards,
Marc Fehling

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