A monolithic geometric multigrid solver for fluid‐structure interactions in ALE formulation

We present a monolithic geometric multigrid solver for fluid‐structure interaction problems in Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian coordinates. The coupled dynamics of an incompressible fluid with nonlinear hyperelastic solids gives rise to very large and ill‐conditioned systems of algebraic equations. Direct solvers usually are out of question because of memory limitations, and standard coupled iterative solvers are seriously affected by the bad condition number of the system matrices. The use of partitioned preconditioners in Krylov subspace iterations is an option, but the convergence will be limited by the outer partitioning. Our proposed solver is based on a Newton linearization of the fully monolithic system of equations, discretized by a Galerkin finite element method. Approximation of the linearized systems is based on a monolithic generalized minimal residual method iteration, preconditioned by a geometric multigrid solver. The special character of fluid‐structure interactions is accounted for by a partitioned scheme within the multigrid smoother only. Here, fluid and solid field are segregated as Dirichlet–Neumann coupling. We demonstrate the efficiency of the multigrid iteration by analyzing 2d and 3d benchmark problems. While 2d problems are well manageable with available direct solvers, challenging 3d problems highly benefit from the resulting multigrid solver. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.