The flow past an obstacle is a fundamental object in fluid mechanics. In 1967 Finn and Smith proved the unique existence of stationary solutions, called the physically reasonable solutions, to the Navier–Stokes equations in a two-dimensional exterior domain modeling this type of flows when the Reynolds number is sufficiently small. The asymptotic behavior of their solution at spatial infinity has been studied in detail and well understood by now, while its stability has remained open due to the difficulty specific to the two-dimensionality. In this paper, we prove that the physically reasonable solutions constructed by Finn and Smith are asymptotically stable with respect to small and well-localized initial perturbations.

In this paper, a new type of stabilized finite element method is discussed for Oseen equations based on the local L2 projection stabilized technique for the velocity field. Velocity and pressure are approximated by two kinds of mixed finite element spaces, Pl2–P1, (l = 1,2). A main advantage of the proposed method lies in that, all the computations are performed at the same element level, without the need of nested meshes or the projection of the gradient of velocity onto a coarse level. Stability and convergence are proved for two kinds of stabilized schemes. Numerical experiments confirm the theoretical results.

This paper presents anextension to stabilized methods of the standard technique for thenumerical analysis of mixed methods. We prove that the stability of stabilizedmethods follows from an underlying discrete inf-sup condition, plus a uniformseparation property between bubble and velocity finite element spaces. We applythe technique introduced to provethe sta bi li ty of stabilized spectral element methods so asstabilized solution of the primitive equations of the ocean.