A parallel solver for fluid–structure interaction problems with Lagrange multiplier

Abstract

The aim of this work is to present a parallel solver for a formulation of fluid–structure interaction (FSI) problems which makes use of a distributed Lagrange multiplier in the spirit of the fictitious domain method. The fluid subproblem, consisting of the non-stationary Stokes equations, is discretized in space by Q2–P1 finite elements, whereas the structure subproblem, consisting of the linear or finite incompressible elasticity equations, is discretized in space by Q1 finite elements. A first order semi-implicit finite difference scheme is employed for time discretization. The resulting linear system at each time step is solved by a parallel GMRES solver, accelerated by block diagonal or triangular preconditioners. The parallel implementation is based on the PETSc library. Several numerical tests have been performed on Linux clusters to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed FSI solver.