Sharp inf-sup estimate for the Stokes equation in tight domains with periodic pillars and some numerical implications

TL;DR

This paper provides a sharp inf-sup estimate for the Stokes equation in microfluidic domains with periodic pillars, revealing fundamental stability degradation and proposing an adaptive AL stabilization method validated by numerical experiments.

Contribution

It rigorously analyzes the inf-sup constant decay in pillar geometries and introduces a novel adaptive stabilization strategy to address associated numerical challenges.

Findings

Inf-sup constant deteriorates as $m^{-1}$ with pillar density.

Severe error amplification and ill-conditioning occur in saddle point systems.

The proposed AL stabilization method is robust and validated numerically.

Abstract

The predictive simulation of fluid dynamics in densely packed microfluidic devices, such as Deterministic Lateral Displacement (DLD) arrays, is severely bottlenecked by the stagnation of standard iterative solvers. In this paper, we reveal that this failure is not an algorithmic artifact, but fundamentally rooted in the pre-asymptotic degradation of the pressure-velocity coupling stability. By rigorously analyzing periodic pillar geometries in this generalized lattice framework, we prove that the continuous Ladyzhenskaya-Babu\v{s}ka-Brezzi (LBB) condition, also called the inf-sup constant, deteriorates exactly as $m^{-1}$ up to a positive multiplicative constant, where $m$ is the pillar density (the number of pillars per unit length). This causes a severe a priori error amplification and extreme ill-conditioning in Schur complement of the saddle point system. To overcome this theoretical limit, we propose a parameter-free, adaptively scaled Augmented Lagrangian (AL) stabilization strategy. Extensive numerical experiments on both standard square and highly asymmetric DLD arrays validate our theoretical bounds and demonstrate the robustness of the proposed AL method.