Abstract

In this paper we implement the element-by-element preconditioner and inexact Newton-Krylov methods (developed in the past) for solving stabilized computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems with spectral methods. Two different approaches are implemented for speeding up the process of solving both steady and unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The first approach concerns the application of a scalable preconditioner namely the element by element LU preconditioner, while the second concerns the application of Newton-Krylov (NK) methods for solving non-linear problems. We obtain good agreement with benchmark results on standard CFD problems for various Reynolds numbers. We solve the Kovasznay flow and flow past a cylinder at Re-$100$ with this approach. We also utilize the Newton-Krylov algorithm to solve (in parallel) important model problems such as flow past a circular obstacle in a Newtonian flow field, three dimensional driven cavity, flow past a three dimensional cylinder with different immersion lengths. We explore the scalability and robustness of the formulations for both approaches and obtain very good speedup. Effective implementations of these procedures demonstrate for relatively coarse macro-meshes
the power of higher order methods in obtaining highly accurate results in CFD. While the procedures adopted in the paper have been explored in the past the novelty lies with applications with higher order methods which have been known to be computationally intensive.

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