First-order continuation method for steady-state variably saturated groundwater flow modeling (Q2674999)

The nonlinearity continuation method, which has been recently applied for boundary value problems for the steady-state Richards equation, can be considered as a predictor-corrector procedure. In its previously studied form, the method had a trivial zeroth-order predictor. In this article, a more sophisticated first-order predictor is considered. The cost of such predictor is solution of one linear system per continuation step. The first order predictor is compared to the zeroth-order one on two test cases with finite volume and mimetic finite difference discretizations on various problems. Both test cases featured highly nonlinear constitutive relationships. In most cases, the first-order predictor reduced computational time by decreasing number of continuation steps and Newton iterations.