Staggered solution of fluid‐porous‐media interaction using the method of local Lagrange multipliers

Abstract

AbstractSurface interaction among non‐overlapping bulk‐fluid and porous‐medium bodies occurs in different situations, e. g., the interaction of blood with a blood vessel wall, a body of water with an earth dam structure, or acoustic waves with acoustic panels used in soundproofing. These are multi‐field phenomena, comprising various surface‐ and volume‐coupling mechanisms that should be reflected in the corresponding mathematical models. These models, together with appropriate initial and boundary values, assemble a coupled problem, the solution of which reveals the behaviour of the system under external excitations. The solution is commonly done numerically, following a monolithic or a decoupled approach. Here, the focus is on the latter. To design an efficient decoupled scheme, different types of coupling within the problem are addressed. These are the volume coupling between the degrees of freedom (DOF) within each subdomain, and the surface coupling between the DOF on the common boundaries. In particular, the latter constrains the feasible space of the solution of the problem. In this regard, local Lagrange multipliers (LLM) are employed to reformulate the problem in an unconstrained form. Unlike other domain decomposition methods which are based on using global Lagrange multipliers, the LLM method yields a complete separation of the subdomains and, consequently, facilitates parallel solution of the sub‐problems. Moreover, within the subdomains, the penalty method is used to decouple pressure from other DOF. This procedure, on the one hand, reduces the size of the problem that should be solved at the interface and, on the other hand, removes the burden of using mixed finite elements within the subsystems. In the next step, the stability behaviour of the resulting staggered approach is analysed, and the unconditional stability of the method is established. Finally, the method is employed to solve a benchmark example, and using the numerical results, the reliability of the outcomes of the stability analysis is investigated. (© 2014 Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)