Pressure-correction projection finite element methods (FEMs) are proposed to solve nonstationary natural convection problems in this paper. The first-order and second-order backward difference formulas are applied for time derivative, the stability analysis and error estimates of the semi-discrete schemes are presented using energy method. Compared with characteristic variational multiscale FEM, pressure-correction projection FEMs are more efficient and unconditionally energy stable. Ample numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the pressure-correction projection FEMs for solving these problems.
