Reused LU factorization as a preconditioner for efficient solution of the parabolized stability equations

Abstract

The parabolized stability equations (PSE) are a widely used, efficient method to calculate the evolution of streamwise traveling instabilities in spatially developing, weakly nonparallel flows. Although the PSE are very economical, computational time can be significant due to the repeated solution of linear systems of equations in each marching step. The linear systems of equations are typically solved by LU factorization because of the moderate size and the sparsity of the matrices. In this paper, instead of repeated calculation of the LU factorization, a single LU factorization is calculated in each marching step and used as a preconditioner for an iterative solver. Numerical experiments are conducted on the plane-marching (3D) incompressible PSE, nonlinear PSE (NLPSE) with explicit discretization of the nonlinear terms, and NLPSE with implicit treatment of the nonlinearities. It is shown that the time spent on the solution of the linear systems of equations was reduced by a factor of 2.5, 4.5–7.5, and 20–60 for the three cases, respectively. The only requirement of the proposed numerical techniques is that the solution varies slowly in the marching direction; therefore it is expected to be applicable to similar boundary layer stability problems or slowly varying parabolic partial differential equations. This is supported by the fact that the numerical method was applied to the Boundary Region Equations (BRE) and the line-marching (2D) PSE, the latter being a much smaller problem than its plane-marching counterpart. In these cases, a factor of 50% and 15–30% decrease in the net time of the linear equation solution is reported, respectively.