Reliable and efficient error control for an adaptive Galerkin-characteristic method for convection-dominated diffusion problems

An efficient and reliable a-posteriori error estimator is developed for a characteristic-Galerkin finite element method for time-dependent convection-dominated problems. An adaptive algorithm with variable time and space steps is proposed and studied. At each time step in this algorithm grid coarsening occurs solely at the final iteration of the adaptive procedure, meaning that only time and space refinement is allowed before the final iteration. It is proved that at each time step this adaptive algorithm is capable of reducing errors below a given tolerance in a finite number of iteration steps. Numerical results are presented to check the theoretical analysis.