On the effect of the bulk tangent matrix in partitioned solution schemes for nearly incompressible fluids

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of the bulk modulus on the iterative solution of free surface quasi-incompressible fluids using a mixed partitioned scheme. A practical rule to set up the value of a pseudo-bulk modulus a priori in the tangent bulk stiffness matrix for improving the conditioning of the linear system of algebraic equations is also given. The efficiency of the proposed strategy is tested in several problems analyzing the advantage of the modified bulk tangent matrix with regard to the stability of the pressure field, the convergence rate and the computational speed of the analyses. The technique has been tested on a finite calculus/particle finite element method Lagrangian formulation, but it can be easily extended to other quasi-incompressible stabilized finite element formulations. Copyright (C) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.