Evaluation of multigrid acceleration for preconditioned time-accurate Navier-Stokes algorithms

Abstract

The development of a two-dimensional time-accurate dual time step Navier-Stokes flow solver with time-derivative preconditioning and multigrid acceleration is described. The governing equations are integrated in time with both an explicit Runge-Kutta scheme and an implicit lower-upper symmetric-Gauss-Seidel scheme in a finite volume framework, yielding second-order accuracy in space and time. Issues concerning the implementation of multigrid for preconditioned, dual time step algorithms are discussed. Steady and unsteady computations were made of lid driven cavity flow, thermally driven cavity flow and pulsatile channel flow for a variety of conditions to validate the schemes and evaluate the effectiveness of multigrid for time-accurate simulations. Significant speedups were observed for steady and unsteady simulations. The speedups for unsteady simulations were problem dependent, a function of how rapidly the flow varied in time and the size of the allowable time step.