Parallel multilevel solution of Rayleigh‐Benard‐Marangoni problems

The Rayleigh‐Benard‐Marangoni problem for natural convection in a rectangular cavity with thermocapillary forces on a free surface is investigated using a stream function‐vorticity formulation. The nonlinear system is iteratively decoupled and high‐degree p finite elements are used for the discretization of the physical domain. The linear systems arising from the discretization at each iteration are solved using a spectral multilevel scheme, which is a natural preconditioner for high‐p (spectral) elements. The spectral multilevel solver lends itself to parallelization in an element‐by‐element (EBE) framework. Simulation results are presented and compared to previously published results. The multilevel efficiency is compared to previous results for the driven cavity problem. Parallel performance studies are presented for the Cray T3E distributed memory architecture.