Efficient Newton-multigrid FEM Solver for Multifield Nonlinear Coupled Problems Applied to Thixoviscoplastic Flows

Abstract

This note is concerned with efficient Newton-multigrid FEM solver for multifield nonlinear flow problems. In our approach, for efficient FEM solver, we advantageously use the delicate symbiosis aspects of the problem settings for FEM approximations, and the algorithmic tools to obtain the numerical solutions. We concretize our ideas on thixoviscoplastic flow problems. It is a two-field coupled nonlinear problem. And beside the integrated nonlinearity within momentum and microstructure equations, thixoviscoplastic problems induce a nonlinear two-way coupling. As far as FEM numerical solutions are concerned, we set the problem in a suitable variational form to use the corresponding wellposedness analysis to develop FEM techniques for the solver. Indeed, the wellposedness study is not an intellectual exercise, rather it is the foundation for the approximate thixoviscoplastic problem as well as for the development of an efficient solver. We base our investigations for the solver on our wellposedness and error analysis results of thixoviscoplastic flow problems published in Proc. Appl. Math. Mech. [1, 2]. We continue our series, and proceed to develop a monolithic Newton-multigrid thixoviscoplastic solver. The solver is based on Newton’s method and geometric multigrid techniques to treat the coupling of the problem. So, we use Local Pressure Schur Complement (LPSC) concept to solve the coupled problem on mesh’s elements, and proceed with outer blocks Gauss-Seidel iteration to update the global solutions. Furthermore, we handle the nonlinearity of the problem with the combined adaptive discrete Newton’s and multigrid methods. The adaptivity within discrete Newton’s method is based on the adaptive step-length control for the discrete differencing in the Jacobian calculations, while the convergence of linear multigrid solver is made to match the convergence requirement of nonlinear solver, accordingly. And the solver’s update parameters are solely dependent on the actual convergence rate of the nonlinear problem. We provide the numerical results of solver performance for thixoviscoplastic lid-driven cavity flow.