Multilevel field-split preconditioners with domain decomposition for steady and unsteady flow problems

Abstract

With the incremental applications of Newton–Krylov methods for solving large sparse nonlinear systems of equations, the design of robust and scalable linear preconditioners plays an essential role for the whole solver. In this paper, we investigate the family of field-split (FS) preconditioners with different combinations of physics-based and domain decomposition methods, applied to the two typical fluid problems, i.e., the unsteady flow through fractured porous media and the steady buoyancy driven flow. In the implementation, several new versions of FS preconditioners are considered under the framework of the domain decomposition technique: additive FS, multiplicative FS, Schur-complement FS, and the constrained pressure residual (CPR) method, where the inverse of corresponding matrices is approximated by using the restricted additive Schwarz (RAS) algorithm. Rigorous eigenvalue analysis for various FS preconditioners is also provided for facilitating the design of algorithms. In particular, our approach further enhances the numerical performance by presenting a family of multilevel field-split methods for efficiently preconditioning. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the robustness and parallel scalability of the proposed preconditioning strategies for both standard benchmarks as well as realistic flow problems on a supercomputer.