Optimal convergence analysis of two RPC-SAV schemes for the unsteady incompressible magnetohydrodynamics equations

Abstract In this paper, we present and analyze two linear and fully decoupled schemes for solving the unsteady incompressible magnetohydrodynamics equations. The rotational pressure-correction (RPC) approach is adopted to decouple the system, and the recently developed scalar auxiliary variable (SAV) method is used to treat the nonlinear terms explicitly and keep energy stability. One is the first-order RPC-SAV-Euler and the other one is generalized Crank–Nicolson-type scheme: GRPC-SAV-CN. For the RPC-SAV-Euler scheme, both unconditionally energy stability and optimal convergence are derived. The new GRPC-SAV-CN is constructed and can be regarded as a parameterized scheme, which includes PC-SAV-CN when the parameter $\beta =0$ and RPC-SAV-CN when $\beta \in (0,\frac{1}{2}]$; see Algorithm 3.2. However, Jiang and Yang (Jiang, N. & Yang, H. (2021) SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 43, A2869–A2896) point out that the SAV method has low accuracy by several commonly tested benchmark flow problem when solving Navier–Stokes equations. To improve the accuracy, we added two stabilization $-\alpha _{1}\varDelta t\nu \varDelta (\widetilde{\textbf{u}}^{n+1}-{\textbf{u}}^{n})$ and $\alpha _{2}\varDelta t\sigma ^{-1}\mbox{curl}\mbox{curl} (\textbf{H}^{n+1}-\textbf{H}^{n})$ in the GRPC-SAV-CN scheme, which play decisive roles in giving optimal error estimates. The unconditionally energy stability of the proposed scheme is given. We prove that the PC-SAV-CN scheme has second-order convergence speed, and the RPC-SAV-CN one has 1.5-order convergence rate. Finally, some numerical examples are presented to verify the validity and convergence of the numerical schemes.