An H1-conforming virtual element for Darcy and Brinkman equations

The focus of this paper is on developing a virtual element method (VEM) for Darcy and Brinkman equations. In [L. Beirão da Veiga, C. Lovadina and G. Vacca, ESAIM Math. Model. Numer. Anal. 51 (2017)], we presented a family of virtual elements for Stokes equations and we defined a new virtual element space of velocities such that the associated discrete kernel is pointwise divergence-free. We use a slightly different virtual element space having two fundamental properties: The L2-projection onto Pk is exactly computable on the basis of the degrees of freedom, and the associated discrete kernel is still pointwise divergence-free. The resulting numerical scheme for the Darcy equation has optimal order of convergence and H1-conforming velocity solution. We can apply the same approach to develop a robust virtual element method for the Brinkman equation that is stable for both the Stokes and Darcy limit case. We provide a rigorous error analysis of the method and several numerical tests.