A fourth‐order H 1 ‐Galerkin mixed finite element method for Kuramoto–Sivashinsky equation

A H 1 ‐Galerkin mixed finite element method is applied to the Kuramoto–Sivashinsky equation by using a splitting technique, which results in a coupled system. The method described in this article may also be considered as a Petrov–Galerkin method with cubic spline space as trial space and piecewise linear space as test space, since the second derivative of a cubic spline is a linear spline. Optimal‐order error estimates are obtained without any restriction on the mesh for both semi‐discrete and fully discrete schemes. The advantage of this method over that presented in Manickam et al., Comput. Math. Appl. vol. 35(6) (1998) pp. 5–25; for the same problem is that the size (i.e., ( n + 1) × ( n + 1)) of each resulting linear system is less than half of the size of the linear system of the earlier method, where n is the number of subintervals in the partition. Further, there is a requirement of less regularity on exact solution in this method. The results are validated with numerical examples. Finally, instability behavior of the solution is numerically captured with this method.