The objective of this thesis is to develop a more efficient solver for a large system of linear equations arising from finite element discretization on unstructured tetrahedral meshes for a scalar elliptic partial differential equation of second order for pressure in a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation.
Segregated solution methods (or pressure correction type methods) are a widely used approach to obtain solutions of Navier-Stokes equations during numerical simulation by many commercial CFD codes. At each time step, these simulations usually require the approximate solution of a series of scalar equations for velocity, pressure and temperature. Even if the simulation does not require high-accuracy approximations, the large systems of linear equations for pressure may not be efficiently solved. The matrices of these systems of linear equations of real-life industry problems often strongly violate weak diagonal dominance and the numerical simulation often requires solutions of very large systems with over a few hundred thousands degrees of freedom. These conditions produce very ill-conditioned systems of linear equations. Therefore, it is very difficult to solve such systems of linear equations efficiently using most currently available common iterative solvers.
A survey of solvers for systems of linear equations was undertaken to determine the preferred solution methodology. An algebraic multigrid preconditioned conjugate gradient (AMGPCG) method solver was chosen for these problems. This solver uses the algebraic multigrid (AMG) cycle as a preconditioner for the conjugate gradient (CG) method. The disadvantages of the conventional AMG method are an expensive setup time and large memory requirements, particularly for three dimensional problems. The disadvantage of an expensive setup time needs to be overcome because the simulation usually requires only low-accuracy approximations for pressure. Also it is important to overcome the disadvantage of the large memory requirements for use in commercial software.
In this work, an efficient AMGPCG solver is developed by overcoming the disadvantages of the conventional AMG method. The robustness of AMGPCG is shown theoretically so that the solver is always convergent. Optimum or close to optimum rates of convergence behavior for the solver are shown numerically so that the number of necessary iterations to obtain the estimated solution is approximately independent of mesh resolution. Furthermore, numerical experiments of solving pressure for some industry problems were carried out and compared with other efficient solvers including a fast commercial AMGPCG solver (SAMG, release 20b1). It was found that the developed AMGPCG solver was the fastest among these solvers for solving these problems and its algorithm has been numerically proven to be efficient. In addition, the memory requirement is at an acceptable level for commercial CFD codes.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/216515 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Iwamura, Chihiro, chihiro_iwamura@ybb.ne.jp |
| Publisher | Swinburne University of Technology. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.swin.edu.au/), Copyright Chihiro Iwamura |
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