Fast solvers for finite difference approximations for the Stokes and Navier-Stokes equations
The authors consider several methods for solving the linear equations arising from finite difference discretizations of the Stokes equations. The pressure equation method presented here for the first time, apparently, and the method, presented by Bramble and Pasciak, are shown to have computational effort that grows slowly with the number of grid points. The methods work with second-order accurate discretizations. Computational results are shown for both the Stokes and incompressible Navier-Stokes at low Reynolds number. The inf-sup conditions resulting from three finite difference approximations of the Stokes equations are proven. These conditions are used to prove that the Schur complement Q[sub h] of the linear system generated by each of these approximations is bounded uniformly away from zero. For the pressure equation method, this guarantees that the conjugate gradient method applied to Q[sub h] converges in a finite number of iterations which is independent of mesh size. The fact that Q[sub h] is bounded below is used to prove convergence estimates for the solutions generated by these finite difference approximations. One of the estimates is for a staggered grid and the estimate of the scheme shows that both the pressure and the velocity parts of the solution are second-order accurate. Iterative methods are compared by the use of the regularized central differencing introduced by Strikwerda. Several finite difference approximations of the Stokes equations by the SOR method are compared and the excellence of the approximations by the regularized central differencing over the other finite difference approximation is mentioned. This difference gives rise to a linear equation with a matrix which is slightly non-symmetric. The convergence of the typical steepest descent method and conjugate gradient method, which is almost as same as the typical conjugate gradient method, applied to slightly non-symmetric positive definite matrices are proven.
- Research Organization:
- Wisconsin Univ., Madison, WI (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 7301316
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: Thesis (Ph.D.)
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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