Composite Newton-PCG and quasi-Newton iterations for nonlinear consolidation (Q1205093)

The author considers nonlinear elasto-plastic soil consolidation problems. Space discretization is done by a mixed finite element approach for the displacement and the pore pressure. Implicit time integration techniques based on generalized trapezoidal and backward differencing formulas are used. In the end a large scale nonlinear system of equations is to be solved in each time step. The main purpose of the paper is to report on numerical experiments obtained by using several nonlinear solvers. In particular, Newton's method, a composite Newton-PCG method and a secant-Newton method with BFGS-update are considered. The presented results show the superiority of the Newton-PCG method for most of the tested examples.