Summing equations vs solving a system

Dear Community,

I am studying mixed variational problems, i.e. with multiple unknowns. When reading the exampe of the mixed poisson problem from the documentation page, I noticed that the weak forms of the two equations

\sigma -\nabla u = 0,\\ \nabla\cdot u =-f,

are then treated as one equation, by summing them:

\int \sigma\cdot \tau + \nabla\cdot \tau u + \nabla \cdot \sigma v dx = -\int fv dx + \int_\Gamma u_0 \tau\cdot n ds \qquad \forall (\tau,v)\in V\times W

I also found this old tutorial about an advection-reaction system that also sums the equations.

  • How can one recover a solution from one equation, with multiple unkonwns?
  • And what is the benefit of doing this versus solving a system with a “monolithic” block-matrix?

Thanks!

The procedure is described here in section 1.2