A Green's function preconditioner for the steady-state Navier-Stokes equations

In this paper we present an efficient method for solving the sparse linear system of equations arising from the discretization of the linearised steady-state Navier-Stokes equations (also known as the Oseen equations). The solver is an iterative method of Krylov subspace type for which we devise a preconditioner based on Green's tensor for the Oseen operator. The preconditioner supersedes existing preconditioners for the Oseen problem in that it exhibits only a mild dependence on the viscosity (inverse Reynolds number) and, most importantly, improved performance with the size of the problem. This comes as no surprise, as preconditioners based on the continuous inverse are expected to perform better on discretizations which approximate well the continuous operator

Fast Solvers for Models of Fluid Flow with Spectral Elements

We introduce a preconditioning technique based on Domain Decomposition and the Fast Diagonalization Method that can be applied to tensor product based discretizations of the steady convection-diffusion and the linearized Navier-Stokes equations. The method is based on iterative substructuring where fast diagonalization is used to efficiently eliminate the interior degrees of freedom and subsidiary subdomain solves. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this preconditioner in numerical simulations using a spectral element discretization. This work extends the use of Fast Diagonalization to steady convection-diffusion systems. We also extend the "least-squares commutator" preconditioner, originally developed for the finite element method, to a matrix-free spectral element framework. We show that these two advances, when used together, allow for efficient computation of steady-state solutions the the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations using high-order spectral element discretizations

Preconditioning and fast solvers for incompressible flow

We give a brief description with references of work on fast solution methods for incompressible Navier-Stokes problems which has been going on for about a decade. Specifically we describe preconditioned iterative strategies which involve the use of simple multigrid cycles for subproblems

h-multigrid agglomeration based solution strategies for discontinuous Galerkin discretizations of incompressible flow problems

In this work we exploit agglomeration based $h$-multigrid preconditioners to speed-up the iterative solution of discontinuous Galerkin discretizations of the Stokes and Navier-Stokes equations. As a distinctive feature $h$-coarsened mesh sequences are generated by recursive agglomeration of a fine grid, admitting arbitrarily unstructured grids of complex domains, and agglomeration based discontinuous Galerkin discretizations are employed to deal with agglomerated elements of coarse levels. Both the expense of building coarse grid operators and the performance of the resulting multigrid iteration are investigated. For the sake of efficiency coarse grid operators are inherited through element-by-element $L^2$ projections, avoiding the cost of numerical integration over agglomerated elements. Specific care is devoted to the projection of viscous terms discretized by means of the BR2 dG method. We demonstrate that enforcing the correct amount of stabilization on coarse grids levels is mandatory for achieving uniform convergence with respect to the number of levels. The numerical solution of steady and unsteady, linear and non-linear problems is considered tackling challenging 2D test cases and 3D real life computations on parallel architectures. Significant execution time gains are documented.Comment: 78 pages, 7 figure

An adaptive preconditioner for steady incompressible flows

This paper describes an adaptive preconditioner for numerical continuation of incompressible Navier--Stokes flows. The preconditioner maps the identity (no preconditioner) to the Stokes preconditioner (preconditioning by Laplacian) through a continuous parameter and is built on a first order Euler time-discretization scheme. The preconditioner is tested onto two fluid configurations: three-dimensional doubly diffusive convection and a reduced model of shear flows. In the former case, Stokes preconditioning works but a mixed preconditioner is preferred. In the latter case, the system of equation is split and solved simultaneously using two different preconditioners, one of which is parameter dependent. Due to the nature of these applications, this preconditioner is expected to help a wide range of studies