A parallel finite element sliding mesh technique for the simulation of viscous flows in agitated tanks |
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Authors: | Christian A Rivera Mourad Heniche François Bertrand Roland Glowinski Philippe A Tanguy |
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Institution: | 1. Research Center for Industrial Flows Processes (URPEI) and Center for Applied Research on Polymers and Composites (CREPEC), Department of Chemical Engineering, école Polytechnique Montreal, P.O. Box 6079, Station Centre‐ville, Montréal, Que., Canada H3C 3A7;2. Department of Mathematics, University of Houston, 651 PGH, Houston, TX 77204‐3008, U.S.A. |
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Abstract: | A parallel sliding mesh algorithm for the finite element simulation of viscous fluid flows in agitated tanks is presented. Lagrange multipliers are used at the sliding interfaces to enforce the continuity between the fixed and moving subdomains. The novelty of the method consists of the coupled solution of the resulting velocity–pressure‐Lagrange multipliers system of equations by an ILU(0)‐QMR solver. A penalty parameter is introduced for both the interface and the incompressibility constraints to avoid pivoting problems in the ILU(0) algorithm. To handle the convective term, both the Newton–Raphson scheme and the semi‐implicit linearization are tested. A penalty parameter is introduced for both the interface and the incompressibility constraints to avoid the failure of the ILU(0) algorithm due to the lack of pivoting. Furthermore, this approach is versatile enough so that it allows partitioning of sliding and fixed subdomains if parallelization is required. Although the sliding mesh technique is fairly common in CFD, the main advantage of the proposed approach is its low computational cost due to the inexpensive and parallelizable calculations that involve preconditioned sparse iterative solvers. The method is validated for Couette and coaxial stirred tanks. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
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Keywords: | Lagrange multiplier method finite element method parallel computing Navier– Stokes equations sliding grids domain decomposition agitated tanks fluid mixing |
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