AN ALGEBRAIC MULTIGRID SOLVER FOR NAVIER-STOKES PROBLEMS

An efficient numerical method is presented for solving the equations o f motion for viscous fluids. The equations are discretized on the basi s of unstructured finite element meshes and then solved by direct iter ation. Advective fluxes are temporarily fixed at each iteration to pro vide a linearized set of coupled equations which are then also solved by iteration using a fully implicit algebraic multigrid (AMG) scheme. A rapid convergence to machine accuracy is achieved that is almost mes h-independent. The scaling of computing time with mesh size is therefo re close to the optimum.