AN ALGEBRAIC MULTIGRID SOLVER FOR NAVIER-STOKES PROBLEMS

An efficient numerical method is presented for solving the equations of motion for viscous fluids. The equations are discretized on the basis of unstructured finite element meshes and then solved by direct iteration. Advective fluxes are temporarily fixed at each iteration to provide a linearized set of coupled equations which are then also solved by iteration using a fully implicit algebraic multigrid (AMG) scheme. A rapid convergence to machine accuracy is achieved that is almost mesh-independent. The scaling of computing time with mesh size is therefore close to the optimum.