Acceleration of preconditioned Krylov solvers for bubbly flow problems

Abstract

We consider the linear system arising from discretization of the pressure Poisson equation with Neumann boundary conditions, derived from bubbly flow problems. In the literature, preconditioned Krylov iterative solvers are proposed, but they often suffer from slow convergence for relatively large and complex problems. We extend these traditional solvers with the so-called deflation technique, that accelerates the convergence substantially and has favorable parallel properties. Several numerical aspects are considered, such as the singularity of the coefficient matrix and the varying density field at each time step. We demonstrate theoretically that the resulting deflation method accelerates the convergence of the iterative process. Thereafter, this is also demonstrated numerically for 3-D bubbly flow applications, both with respect to the number of iterations and the computing time. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.