Streamline-upwind Petrov/Galerkin method (SUPG) vs residual-free bubbles (RFB)

The purpose of this paper is to present the residual-free bubbles (RFB) method and to show its relationship with the streamline-upwind Petrov/Galerkin method (SUPG). The paper is organized as follows. After the Introduction, we show how the failure of classical finite element methods for convection-dominated convection–diffusion problem can be explained by energy considerations. Then we describe the residual-free bubbles ideas, and in the last section we show the equivalence of RFB and SUPG in a simple case.