Recycling Krylov subspaces for efficient partitioned solution of aerostructural adjoint systems

Abstract

Robust and efficient solvers for coupled-adjoint linear systems are crucial to successful aerostructural optimization. Monolithic and partitioned strategies can be applied. The monolithic approach is expected to offer better robustness and efficiency for strong fluid-structure interactions. However, it requires a higher implementation cost and convergence may depend on appropriate scaling and initialization strategies. On the other hand, the modularity of the partitioned method enables a straightforward implementation while its convergence may require relaxation. In addition, a partitioned solver often leads to a higher number of iterations to get the same level of convergence as the monolithic one.The objective of this paper is to accelerate the fluid-structure coupled-adjoint partitioned solver by considering techniques borrowed from approximate invariant subspace recycling strategies adapted to sequences of linear systems with varying right-hand sides. Indeed, in a partitioned framework, the structural source term attached to the fluid block of equations affects the right-hand side with the nice property of quickly converging to a constant value. For the fluid block of equations, we also consider deflation of approximate eigenvectors in conjunction with advanced inner-outer Krylov solvers.To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed recycling strategy, we compute the coupled derivatives for two emblematic problems in transonic viscous flow. The first one is an aeroelastic configuration of the ONERA-M6 fixed wing. For this exercise, the fluid grid was coupled to a structural model specifically designed to exhibit a high flexibility. The second one is a wing-body aeroelastic configuration of the Common Research Model. All computations are performed using a fully linearized one-equation Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model. Numerical simulations show up to 39% reduction in matrix-vector products for GCRO-DR and up to 25% for the nested FGCRO-DR solver.