Search

We present novel coupling schemes for partitioned multiphysics simulation that combine four important aspects for strongly coupled problems: implicit coupling per time step, fast and robust acceleration of the corresponding iterative coupling, support for multirate time stepping, and higher-order convergence in time. To achieve this, we combine waveform relaxation—a known method to achieve higher-order in applications with split time stepping based on continuous representations of coupling variables in time— with interface quasi-Newton coupling, which has been developed throughout the last decade and is generally accepted as a very robust iterative coupling method even for gluing together black-box simulation codes. We show convergence results (in terms of convergence of the iterative solver and in terms of approximation order in time) for two academic testcases—a heat transfer scenario and a fluid-structure interaction simulation. We show that we achieve the expected approximation order and that our iterative method is competitive in terms of iteration counts with those designed for simpler first-order-in-time coupling.

We consider the Dirichlet-Neumann iteration for partitioned simulation of thermal fluid-structure interaction, also called conjugate heat transfer. We analyze its convergence rate for two coupled fully discretized 1D linear heat equations with jumps in the material coefficients across these. These are discretized using implicit Euler in time, a finite element method on one domain, a finite volume method on the other one and variable aspect ratio. We provide an exact formula for the spectral radius of the iteration matrix. This shows that for large time steps, the convergence rate is the aspect ratio times the quotient of heat conductivities and that decreasing the time step will improve the convergence rate. Numerical results confirm the analysis and show that the 1D formula is a good estimator in 2D and even for nonlinear thermal FSI applications., Comment: 29 pages, 20 figures

Our prime motivation is thermal fluid-structure interaction (FSI) where two domains with jumps in the material coefficients are connected through an interface. There exist two main strategies to simulate FSI models: the monolithic approach where a new code is tailored for the coupled equations and the partitioned approach that allows to reuse existing software for each sub-problem. Here we want to develop multirate methods that contribute to the time parallelization of the sub-problems for the partitioned simulation of FSI problems.

An important challenge when coupling two different time dependent problems is to increase parallelization in time. We suggest a multirate Neumann-Neumann waveform relaxation algorithm to solve two heterogeneous coupled heat equations. In order to fix the mismatch produced by the multirate feature at the space-time interface a linear interpolation is constructed. The heat equations are discretized using a finite element method in space, whereas two alternative time integration methods are used: implicit Euler and SDIRK2. We perform a one-dimensional convergence analysis for the nonmultirate fully discretized heat equations using implicit Euler to find the optimal relaxation parameter in terms of the material coefficients, the stepsize and the mesh resolution. This gives a very efficient method which needs only two iterations. Numerical results confirm the analysis and show that the 1D nonmultirate optimal relaxation parameter is a very good estimator for the multirate 1D case and even for multirate and nonmultirate 2D examples using both implicit Euler and SDIRK2., Comment: 32 pages, 12 figures

We analyze the convergence rate of the Dirichlet-Neumann iteration for the fully discretized unsteady transmission problem. Specifically, we consider the coupling of two linear heat equations on two identical non overlapping domains with jumps in the material coefficients across these. In this context, we derive the iteration matrix of the coupled problem. In the 1D case, the spectral radius of the iteration matrix tends to the ratio of heat conductivities in the semidiscrete spatial limit, but to the ratio of the products of density and specific heat capacity in the semidiscrete temporal one. This explains the fast convergence previously observed for cases with strong jumps in the material coefficients.