This work develops a nonlinear multigrid method for diffusion problems
discretized by cell-centered finite volume methods on general unstructured
grids. The multigrid hierarchy is constructed algebraically using aggregation
of degrees of freedom and spectral decomposition of reference linear operators
associated with the aggregates. For rapid convergence, it is important that the
resulting coarse spaces have good approximation properties. In our approach,
the approximation quality can be directly improved by including more spectral
degrees of freedom in the coarsening process. Further, by exploiting local
coarsening and a piecewise-constant approximation when evaluating the nonlinear
component, the coarse level problems are assembled and solved without ever
re-visiting the fine level, an essential element for multigrid algorithms to
achieve optimal scalability. Numerical examples comparing relative performance
of the proposed nonlinear multigrid solvers with standard single-level
approaches -- Picard's and Newton's methods -- are presented. Results show that
the proposed solver consistently outperforms the single-level methods, both in
efficiency and robustness
