Stabilized reduced basis methods for parametrized steady Stokes and Navier–Stokes equations

It is well known in the Reduced Basis approximation of saddle point problems that the Galerkin projection on the reduced space does not guarantee the inf–sup approximation stability even if a stable high fidelity method was used to generate snapshots. For problems in computational fluid dynamics, the lack of inf–sup stability is reflected by the inability to accurately approximate the pressure field. In this context, inf–sup stability is usually recovered through the enrichment of the velocity space with suitable supremizer functions. The main goal of this work is to propose an alternative approach, which relies on the residual based stabilization techniques customarily employed in the Finite Element literature, such as Brezzi–Pitkaranta, Franca–Hughes, streamline upwind Petrov–Galerkin, Galerkin Least Square. In the spirit of offline–online reduced basis computational splitting, two such options are proposed, namely offline-only stabilization and offline–online stabilization. These approaches are then compared to (and combined with) the state of the art supremizer enrichment approach. Numerical results are discussed, highlighting that the proposed methodology allows to obtain smaller reduced basis spaces (i.e., neglecting supremizer enrichment) for which a modified inf–sup stability is still preserved at the reduced order level.