Unconditional error estimates for time dependent viscoelastic fluid flow

The unconditional convergence of finite element method for two-dimensional time-dependent viscoelastic flow with an Oldroyd B constitutive equation is given in this paper, while all previous works require certain time-step restrictions. The approximation is stabilized by using the Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) approximation for the constitutive equation. The analysis bases on a splitting of the error into two parts: the error from the time discretization of the PDEs and the error from the finite element approximation of corresponding iterated time-discrete PDEs. The approach used in this paper can be applied to more general couple nonlinear parabolic and hyperbolic systems.