Preconditioning a Fluid--Structure Interaction Problem Using Monolithic and Block Domain Decomposition Methods for the Fluid

TL;DR

This paper develops and compares monolithic and block domain decomposition preconditioners for fluid-structure interaction problems, demonstrating improved robustness and scalability in patient-specific artery simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a monolithic preconditioning approach for FSI problems and compares its performance with the SIMPLE block preconditioner using Schwarz methods.

Findings

Monolithic preconditioning outperforms SIMPLE in robustness.

The methods scale well with increased flow rates.

Parallel strong scaling is successfully demonstrated.

Abstract

A fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problem is solved via a monolithic coupling of the fluid, structure, and geometry subproblems. The iterative GMRES solver is accelerated with the FaCSI block preconditioner. In the FaCSI factorization, the fluid subproblem is approximated using either a monolithic preconditioner or the block preconditioner SIMPLE. Two-level overlapping Schwarz methods are then used to approximate the arising inverses. The robustness and scalability of the monolithic and SIMPLE preconditioners are compared for a realistic patient-specific artery. The results indicate that the monolithic preconditioning of the fluid subproblem performs better than the SIMPLE approach. Different flow rates are tested and parallel strong scaling has been evaluated.