A Discontinuous Galerkin and Semismooth Newton Approach for the Numerical Solution of the Nonhomogeneous Bingham Flow

This paper is devoted to the study of non-homogeneous Bingham flows. We introduce a second-order, divergence-conforming discretization for the Bingham constitutive equations, coupled with a discontinuous Galerkin scheme for the mass density. One of the main challenges when analyzing viscoplastic materials is the treatment of the yield stress. In order to overcome this issue, in this work we propose a local regularization, based on a Huber smoothing step. We also take advantage of the properties of the divergence conforming and discontinuous Galerkin formulations to incorporate upwind discretizations to stabilize the formulation. The stability of the continuous problem and the full-discrete scheme are analyzed. Further, a semismooth Newton method is proposed for solving the obtained fully-discretized system of equations at each time step. Finally, several numerical examples that illustrate the main features of the problem and the properties of the numerical scheme are presented.