A monolithic FEM/Multigrid solver for an ALE formulation of fluid-structure interaction with applications in biomechanics

Abstract

We investigate a new method of solving the problem of fluid-structure interaction of an incompressible elastic object in laminar incompressible viscous flow. Our proposed method is based on a fully implicit, monolithic formulation of the problem in the arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian framework. High order FEM is used to obtain the discrete approximation of the problem. In order to solve the resulting systems a quasi-Newton method is applied with the linearized systems being approximated by the divided differences approach. The linear problems of saddle-point type are solved by a standard geometric multigrid with local multilevel pressure Schur complement smoothers.