Nonlinear acceleration of coupled fluid–structure transient thermal problems by Anderson mixing

Conjugate heat‐transfer problems are typically solved using partitioned methods where fluid and solid subdomains are evaluated separately by dedicated solvers coupled through a common boundary. Strongly coupled schemes for transient analysis require fluid and solid problems to be solved many times each time step until convergence to a steady state. In many practical situations, a fairly simple and frequently employed fixed‐point iteration process is rather ineffective; it leads to a large number of iterations per time step and consequently to long simulation times. In this article, Anderson mixing is proposed as a fixed‐point convergence acceleration technique to reduce computational cost of thermal coupled fluid–solid problems. A number of other recently published methods with applications to similar fluid–structure interaction problems are also reviewed and analyzed. Numerical experiments are presented to illustrate relative performance of these methods on a test problem of rotating pre‐swirl cavity air flow interacting with a turbine disk. It is observed that performance of Anderson mixing method is superior to that of other algorithms in terms of total iteration counts. Additional computational savings are demonstrated by reusing information from previously solved time steps. Copyright © All rights reserved 2012 Rolls‐Royce plc.