PARALLEL OVERLAPPING SCHEME FOR VISCOUS INCOMPRESSIBLE FLOWS

A 3D parallel overlapping scheme for viscous incompressible flow probl ems is presented that combines the finite element method, which is bes t suited for analysing flow in any arbitrarily shaped flow geometry, w ith the finite difference method, which is advantageous in terms of bo th computing time and computer storage. A modified ABMAC method is use d as the solution algorithm, to which a sophisticated time integration scheme proposed by the present authors has been applied. Parallelizat ion is based on the domain decomposition method. The RGB (recursive gr aph bisection) algorithm is used for the decomposition of the FEM mesh and simple slice decomposition is used for the FDM mesh. Some estimat es of the parallel performance of FEM, FDM and overlapping computation s are presented. (C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.