Abstract
This paper is concerned with the analysis of the finite element method applied to a nonstationary nonlinear convective problem. Using special estimates of the convective terms, we prove a priori error estimates for an explicit, semidiscrete and implicit scheme.
While the explicit case is rather straightforward via mathematical induction, for the semidiscrete scheme we need to apply so-called continuous mathematical induction and a nonlinear Gronwall lemma. For the implicit scheme, we use a suitable continuation of the discrete implicit solution and again use continuous mathematical induction to prove the error estimates.
Finally, we extend the presented analysis from globally Lipschitz-continuous convective nonlinearities to the locally Lipschitz-continuous case.