Preconditioning by approximations of the discrete Laplacian for 2‐D non‐linear free convection elliptic equations

The paper analyses the preconditioning of non‐linear nonsymmetric equations with approximations of the discrete Laplace operator. The test problems are non‐linear 2‐D elliptic equations that describe natural convection, Darcy flow, in a porous medium. The standard second order accurate finite difference scheme is used to discretize the models’ equations. The discrete approximations are solved with a double iterative process using the Newton method as outer iteration and the preconditioned generalised conjugate gradient (PGCG) methods as inner iteration. Three PGCG algorithms, CGN, CGS and GMRES, are tested. The preconditioning with discrete Laplace operator approximations consists of replacing the solving of the equation with the preconditioner by a few iterations of an appropriate iterative scheme. Two iterative algorithms are tested: incomplete Cholesky (IC) and multigrid (MG). The numerical results show that MG preconditioning leads to mesh independence. CGS is the most robust algorithm but its efficiency is lower than that of GMRES.