Massively parallel finite element computation of three dimensional flow problems

Abstract

The parallel finite element computation of three-dimensional compressible, and incompressible flows, with emphasis on the space-time formulations, mesh moving schemes and implementations on the Connection Machines CM-200 and CM-5 are presented. For computation of unsteady compressible and incompressible flows involving moving boundaries and interfaces, the Deformable-Spatial-Domain/Stabilized-Space-Time (DSD/SST) formulation that previously developed are employed. In this approach, the stabilized finite element formulations of the governing equations are written over the space-time domain of the problem; therefore, the deformation of the spatial domain with respect to time is taken into account automatically. This approach gives the capability to solve a large class of problems involving free surfaces, moving interfaces, and fluid-structure and fluid-particle interactions. By using special mesh moving schemes, the frequency of remeshing is minimized to reduce the projection errors involved in remeshing and also to increase the parallelization ease of the computations. The implicit equation systems arising from the finite element discretizations are solved iteratively by using the GMRES update technique with the diagonal and nodal-block-diagonal preconditioners. These formulations have all been implemented on the CM-200 and CM-5, and have been applied to several large-scale problems. The three-dimensional problems in this report were all computed on the CM-200 and CM-5.