A Robin-Neumann Scheme with Quasi-Newton Acceleration for Partitioned Fluid-Structure Interaction

Abstract

The Dirichlet-Neumann scheme is the most common partitioned algorithm for fluid-structure interaction (FSI) and offers high flexibility concerning the solvers employed for the two subproblems. Nevertheless, it is not without shortcomings: to begin with, the inherent added-mass effect often destabilizes the numerical solution severely. Moreover, the Dirichlet-Neumann scheme cannot be applied to FSI problems in which an incompressible fluid is fully enclosed by Dirichlet boundaries, as it is incapable of satisfying the volume constraint. In the last decade, interface quasi-Newton methods have proven to control the added-mass effect and substantially speed up convergence by adding a Newton-like update step to the Dirichlet-Neumann coupling. They are, however, without effect on the incompressibility dilemma. As an alternative, the Robin-Neumann scheme generalizes the fluid's boundary condition to a Robin condition by including the Cauchy stresses. While this modification in fact successfully tackles both drawbacks of the Dirichlet-Neumann approach, the price to be paid is a strong dependency on the Robin weighting parameter, with very limited a priori knowledge about good choices. This work proposes a strategy to merge these two ideas and benefit from their combined strengths. The resulting quasi-Newton-accelerated Robin-Neumann scheme is compared to both Robin- and Dirichlet-Neumann variants. The numerical tests demonstrate that it does not only provide faster convergence, but also massively reduces the influence of the Robin parameter, mitigating the main drawback of the Robin-Neumann algorithm.