Nonlinear and parallel algorithms for finite element discretizations of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations

The steady-state Navier-Stokes equations are of considerable interest because they are used to model numerous common physical phenomena. The applications encountered in practice often involve small viscosities and complicated domain geometries, and they result in challenging problems in spite of the vast attention that has been dedicated to them. In this thesis we examine methods for computing the numerical solution of the primitive variable formulation of the incompressible equations on distributed memory parallel computers.; We use the Galerkin method to discretize the differential equations, although most results are stated so that they apply also to stabilized methods. We also reformulate some classical results in a single framework and discuss some issues frequently dismissed in the literature, such as the implementation of pressure space basis and non-homogeneous boundary values.; We consider three nonlinear methods: Newton's method, Oseen's (or Picard) iteration, and sequences of Stokes problems. All these iterative nonlinear methods require solving a linear system at every step. Newton's method has quadratic convergence while that of the others is only linear; however, we obtain theoretical bounds showing that Oseen's iteration is more robust, and we confirm it experimentally. In addition, although Oseen's iteration usually requires more iterations than Newton's method, the linear systems it generates tend to be simpler and its overall costs (in CPU time) are lower. The Stokes problems result in linear systems which are easier to solve, but its convergence is much slower, so that it is competitive only for large viscosities. Inexact versions of these methods are studied, and we explain why the best timings are obtained using relatively modest error tolerances in solving the corresponding linear systems. We also present a new damping optimization strategy based on the quadratic nature of the Navier-Stokes equations, which improves the robustness of all the linearization strategies considered and whose computational cost is negligible.; The algebraic properties of these systems depend on both the discretization and nonlinear method used. We study in detail the positive definiteness and skewsymmetry of the advection submatrices (essentially, convection-diffusion problems). We propose a discretization based on a new trilinear form for Newton's method.; We solve the linear systems using three Krylov subspace methods, GMRES, QMR and TFQMR, and compare the advantages of each. Our emphasis is on parallel algorithms, and so we consider preconditioners suitable for parallel computers such as line variants of the Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel methods, alternating direction implicit methods, and Chebyshev and least squares polynomial preconditioners. These work well for moderate viscosities (moderate Reynolds number). For small viscosities we show that effective parallel solution of the advection subproblem is a critical factor to improve performance. Implementation details on a CM-5 are presented.