Parallel and Scalable Two-Grid Nonlinear Preconditioning Technique for Fully Coupled Solution of Thermal Convective Flow Problems

Abstract

The focus of this paper is on the numerical solution of large sparse nonlinear systems of algebraic equations, which arise from the discretization of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for fluid flows. The inexact Newton algorithm is an efficient and popular technique for solving this kind of nonlinear systems. However, the method may not be suitable for large scale calculations because the number of Newton iterations is not scalable with respect to the number of processors, the grid size, and robust with respect to some physical parameters such as the Reynolds number and the Grashof number. In this paper, we investigate some fully coupled parallel two-grid nonlinear preconditioning algorithm, including a grid sequencing method for the Newton iteration and a two-level overlapping Schwarz preconditioner for the linear iteration. We show numerically that it performs well for solving the thermal convective flow problems on parallel computers.