Adaptive asynchronous time-stepping, stopping criteria, and a posteriori error estimates for fixed-stress iterative schemes for coupled poromechanics problems

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In this paper we develop adaptive iterative coupling schemes for the Biot system modeling coupled poromechanics problems. We particularly consider the space–time formulation of the fixed-stress iterative scheme, in which we first solve the problem of flow over the whole space–time interval, then exploiting the space–time information for solving the mechanics. Two common discretizations of this algorithm are then introduced based on two coupled mixed finite element methods in-space and the backward Euler scheme in-time. Therefrom, adaptive fixed-stress algorithms are build on conforming reconstructions of the pressure and displacement together with equilibrated flux and stresses reconstructions. These ingredients are used to derive a posteriori error estimates for the fixed-stress algorithms, distinguishing the different error components, namely the spatial discretization, the temporal discretization, and the fixed-stress iteration components. Precisely, at the iteration k≥1 of the adaptive algorithm, we prove that our estimate gives a guaranteed and fully computable upper bound on the energy-type error measuring the difference between the exact and approximate pressure and displacement. These error components are efficiently used to design adaptive asynchronous time-stepping and adaptive stopping criteria for the fixed-stress algorithms. Numerical experiments illustrate the efficiency of our estimates and the performance of the adaptive iterative coupling algorithms.