Efficient simulations of large-scale convective heat transfer problems

We describe an approach for efficient solution of large-scale convective heat transfer problems that are formulated as coupled unsteady heat conduction and incompressible fluid-flow equations. The original problem is discretized over time using classical implicit methods, while stabilized finite elements are used for space discretization. The algorithm employed for the discretization of the fluid-flow problem uses Picard’s iterations to solve the arising nonlinear equations. Both problems (the heat transfer and Navier–Stokes equations) give rise to large sparse systems of linear equations. The systems are solved by using an iterative GMRES solver with suitable preconditioning. For the incompressible flow equations, we employ a special preconditioner that is based on an algebraic multigrid (AMG) technique. This paper presents algorithmic and implementation details of the solution procedure, which is suitably tuned – especially for ill-conditioned systems that arise from discretizations of incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. We describe a parallel implementation of the solver using MPI and elements from the PETSC library. The scalability of the solver is favorably compared with other methods, such as direct solvers and the standard GMRES method with ILU preconditioning.