GENERALIZED MULTIGRID APPROACHES TO NONLINEAR TRANSIENT THERMAL PROBLEMS.

For transient thermal problems, discretizing in space by the finite element method yields a system of first-order ordinary differential equations which can be integrated in time by a finite difference based predictor-multicorrector scheme. At each time level the temperature field is obtained by solving a set of algebraic equations. In this paper the multigrid method is adopted for transient thermal problems. In order to model accurately the geometry of practical problems with various material properties, and to use the predictor-corrector scheme for the nonlinear transient analysis, the generalized multigrid approach, similar to that proposed in Reference 1, is employed. Some examples are included to illustrate the performance of this approach for nonlinear transient problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]