ON ERROR ANALYSIS FOR THE 3D NAVIER-STOKES EQUATIONS IN VELOCITY-VORTICITY-HELICITY FORM

We present a rigorous numerical analysis and computational tests for the Galerkin finite element discretization of the velocity-vorticity-helicity formulation of the equilibrium Navier-Stokes equations (NSEs). This formulation, recently derived by the authors, is the first NSE formulation that directly solves for helicity and the first velocity-vorticity formulation to naturally enforce incompressibility of the vorticity, and preliminary computations confirm its potential. We present a numerical scheme; prove stability, existence of solutions, uniqueness under a small data condition, and convergence; and provide numerical experiments to confirm the theory and illustrate the effectiveness of the scheme on a benchmark problem.