The material covered by this book has been taught by one of the authors
in a post-graduate course on Numerical Analysis at the University Pierre
et Marie Curie of Paris. It is an extended version of a previous text
(cf. Girault & Raviart [32J) published in 1979 by Springer-Verlag in
its series: Lecture Notes in Mathematics. In the last decade, many
engineers and mathematicians have concentrated their efforts on the
finite element solution of the Navier-Stokes equations for
incompressible flows. The purpose of this book is to provide a fairly
comprehen- sive treatment of the most recent developments in that field.
To stay within reasonable bounds, we have restricted ourselves to the
case of stationary prob- lems although the time-dependent problems are
of fundamental importance. This topic is currently evolving rapidly and
we feel that it deserves to be covered by another specialized monograph.
We have tried, to the best of our ability, to present a fairly
exhaustive treatment of the finite element methods for inner flows. On
the other hand however, we have entirely left out the subject of
exterior problems which involve radically different techniques, both
from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. Also, we have
neither discussed the implemen- tation of the finite element methods
presented by this book, nor given any explicit numerical result. This
field is extensively covered by Peyret & Taylor [64J and Thomasset
[82].