A Linelet preconditioner for incompressible flows

Abstract

A parallel linelet preconditioner has been implemented to accelerate finite element (FE) solvers for incompressible flows when highly anisotropic meshes are used. The convergence of the standard preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) solver that is commonly used to solve the discrete pressure equations, greatly deteriorates due to the presence of highly distorted elements, which are of mandatory use for high Reynolds-number flows. The linelet preconditioner notably accelerates the convergence rate of the PCG solver in such situations, saving an important amount of CPU time. Unlike other more sophisticated preconditioners, parallelization of the linelet preconditioner is almost straighforward. Numerical examples and some comparisons with other preconditioners are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed preconditioner.

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