HIGH-PERFORMANCE MULTILEVEL ITERATIVE AGGREGATION SOLVER FOR LARGE FINITE-ELEMENT STRUCTURAL-ANALYSIS PROBLEMS

The present study is aimed to overcome difficulties faced with industrial applications of multilevel iterative methods to arbitrary finite element (FE) structural analysis problems. The coarse grid concept, used in multigrid methods, is substituted with an aggregation coarse model based on the mechanical principle. On the base of this approach together with previously developed multilevel preconditioner, an efficient iterative equation solver FEAGS was developed for using in standard comprehensive finite element software systems. Numerical examples for analyses of three-dimensional (3-D) frame structures demonstrate the efficiency of the method. Comparison with incomplete Cholesky conjugate gradient (ICCG) method and direct methods is presented.