Analysis of some projection method based preconditioners for models of incompressible flow

Mingchao Cai

Published 2013-10-03, updated 2013-12-10Version 3

In this paper, several projection method based preconditioners for various incompressible flow models are studied. In particular, we are interested in the theoretical analysis of a pressure-correction projection method based preconditioner \cite{griffith2009accurate}. For both the steady and unsteady Stokes problems, we will show that the preconditioned systems are well conditioned. Moreover, when the flow model degenerates to the mixed form of an elliptic operator, the preconditioned system is an identity no matter what type of boundary conditions are imposed; when the flow model degenerates to the steady Stokes problem, the multiplicities of the non-unitary eigenvalues of the preconditioned system are derived. These results demonstrate the effects of boundary treatments and are related to the stability of the staggered grid discretization. To further investigate the effectiveness of these projection method based preconditioners, numerical experiments are given to compare their performances. Generalizations of these preconditioners to other saddle point problems will also be discussed.