Consistency, convergence and error estimates for a mixed finite element–finite volume scheme to compressible Navier–Stokes equations with general inflow/outflow boundary data

We study convergence of a mixed finite element-finite volume scheme for the compressible Navier–Stokes equations in the isentropic regime under the full range $1<\gamma <\infty $ of the adiabatic coefficients $\gamma $ for the problem with general nonzero inflow–outflow boundary conditions. We propose a modification of Karper’s scheme (2013, A convergent FEM-DG method for the compressible Navier–Stokes equations. Numer. Math., 125, 441–510) in order to accommodate the nonzero boundary data, prove existence of its solutions, establish the stability and uniform estimates, derive a convenient consistency formulation of the balance laws and use it to show the weak convergence of the numerical solutions to a dissipative solution with the Reynolds defect introduced in Abbatiello et al. (2021, Generalized solutions to models of compressible viscous fluids. Discrete Contin. Dyn. Syst., 41, 1--28). If the target system admits a strong solution then the convergence is strong towards the strong solution. Moreover, we establish the convergence rate of the strong convergence in terms of the size of the space discretization $h$ (which is supposed to be comparable with the time step $\varDelta t$). In the case of the nonzero inflow–outflow boundary data all results are new. The latter result is new also for the no-slip boundary conditions and adiabatic coefficients $\gamma $ less than the threshold $3/2$.