Multigrid strategies for viscous flow solvers on anisotropic unstructured meshes (Q1268310)

We investigate unstructured multigrid techniques for relieving the stiffness associated with high-Reynolds number viscous flow simulations on extremely stretched grids. One approach consists in employing a semi-coarsening or directional-coarsening technique, based on the directions of strong coupling within the mesh, in order to construct more optimal coarse grid levels. We develop an alternative approach which employs directional implicit smoothing with regular fully coarsened multigrid levels. The directional implicit smoothing is obtained by constructing implicit lines in the unstructured mesh based on the directions of strong coupling. An order of magnitude increase in convergence rate over the traditional explicit full-coarsening algorithm is demonstrated, and convergence rates for high-Reynolds numher viscous flows which are independent of the grid aspect ratio are obtained. Further acceleration is provided by incorporating low-Mach-number preconditioning techniques and a Newton-GMRES strategy which employs the multigrid scheme as a preconditioner. The compounding effects of these various techniques on speed of convergence are documented through several example test cases. \(\copyright\) Academic Press.