A Geometric Multigrid Preconditioner for Discontinuous Galerkin Shifted Boundary Method

TL;DR

This paper develops a geometric multigrid preconditioner for the Shifted Boundary Method that leverages a Discontinuous Galerkin formulation to efficiently solve PDEs on complex geometries, showing promising results for linear and quadratic elements.

Contribution

It introduces a DG-based multigrid preconditioner tailored for SBM, enabling effective cell-wise smoothing to handle non-symmetric, ill-conditioned systems on complex geometries.

Findings

Effective for linear and quadratic elements in 2D and 3D

Iteration counts grow mildly with mesh refinement

Reduced effectiveness observed for cubic elements in 3D

Abstract

This paper introduces a geometric multigrid preconditioner for the Shifted Boundary Method (SBM) designed to solve PDEs on complex geometries. While SBM simplifies mesh generation by using a non-conforming background grid, it often results in non-symmetric and potentially ill-conditioned linear systems that are challenging to solve efficiently. Standard multigrid methods with pointwise smoothers prove ineffective for such systems due to the localized perturbations introduced by the shifted boundary conditions. To address this challenge, we introduce a Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) formulation for SBM that enables the design of a cell-wise multiplicative smoother within an $hp$-multigrid framework. The element-local nature of DG methods naturally facilitates cell-wise correction, which can effectively handle the local complexities arising from the boundary treatment. Numerical results for the Poisson equation demonstrate favorable performance with mesh refinement for linear ($p=1$) and quadratic ($p=2$) elements in both 2D and 3D, with iteration counts showing mild growth. However, challenges emerge for cubic ($p=3$) elements, particularly in 3D, where the current smoother shows reduced effectiveness.