A domain decomposition strategy to efficiently solve structures containing repeated patterns

TL;DR

This paper introduces a domain decomposition method leveraging repeated patterns in structures to reduce problem size and accelerate convergence, demonstrated on thermal and elastic examples.

Contribution

It proposes a novel variant of the FETI method that exploits repeated domains to improve efficiency and convergence in structural analysis.

Findings

Significant reduction in problem size.

Faster convergence of interface problems.

Effective on thermal and elastic structures.

Abstract

This paper presents a strategy for the computation of structures with repeated patterns based on domain decomposition and block Krylov solvers. It can be seen as a special variant of the FETI method. We propose using the presence of repeated domains in the problem to compute the solution by minimizing the interface error on several directions simultaneously. The method not only drastically decreases the size of the problems to solve but also accelerates the convergence of interface problem for nearly no additional computational cost and minimizes expensive memory accesses. The numerical performances are illustrated on some thermal and elastic academic problems.