Nonlinear Krylov acceleration of reacting flow codes
Krishna Kumar S, Ruchi Rawat, P.D. Smith, Michael Pernice · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 1996
We are working on computational simulations of three-dimensional reactive flows in applications encompassing a broad range of chemical engineering problems. Examples of such processes are coal (pulverized and fluidized bed) and gas combustion, petroleum processing (cracking), and metallurgical operations such as smelting. These simulations involve an interplay of various physical and chemical factors such as fluid dynamics with turbulence, convective and radiative heat transfer, multiphase effects such as fluid-particle and particle-particle interactions, and chemical reaction. The governing equations resulting from modeling these processes are highly nonlinear and strongly coupled, thereby rendering their solution by traditional iterative methods (such as nonlinear line Gauss-Seidel methods) very difficult and sometimes impossible. Hence we are exploring the use of nonlinear Krylov techniques (such as CMRES and Bi-CGSTAB) to accelerate and stabilize the existing solver. This strategy allows us to take advantage of the problem-definition capabilities of the existing solver. The overall approach amounts to using the SIMPLE (Semi-Implicit Method for Pressure-Linked Equations) method and its variants as nonlinear preconditioners for the nonlinear Krylov method. We have also adapted a backtracking approach for inexact Newton methods to damp the Newton step in the nonlinear Krylov method. This will be a report on work in progress. Preliminary results with nonlinear GMRES have been very encouraging: in many cases the number of line Gauss-Seidel sweeps has been reduced by about a factor of 5, and increased robustness of the underlying solver has also been observed.