[davidwilcox]

did anybody ever have success by using the F cycle for pressure? did you have to use small values for parameters like restriction and prolongation? i noticed on this forum that for the problem of the solution not converging, many suggested reducing the relaxation terms. While this indeed helps, it does not always solve the problem. Please share your experiences?

[FMDenaro]

Originally Posted by davidwilcox

did anybody ever have success by using the F cycle for pressure? did you have to use small values for parameters like restriction and prolongation? i noticed on this forum that for the problem of the solution not converging, many suggested reducing the relaxation terms. While this indeed helps, it does not always solve the problem. Please share your experiences?

I am not familiar with multi-grid, I just used it many years ago for the 2D vorticity-stream function but I am interested in this question.
What I remember is that you can suppose for example a Jacobi interation on nested grids with restriction and prolongation operations in such a way to remove large wavenumbers of the error.
I which sense multigrid can alter the convergence of the pressure solver?
I immagine that convergence depends only on the spectral radius of the iteration matrix, even for multigrid, isn't it?

[mprinkey]

I'm sorry that my experience is not more current, but I do remember using F-cycle as a compromise for an electric field solver that I built for part of the Solid-Oxide Fuel Cell Model in in FLUENT in the mid-00s. That linear system contained extreme differences in electrical conductivity (aka diffusivity) between metal interconnects and electrodes and also had huge jump conditions due to electrolytic interfaces. It was the ugliest linear system that I have ever tried to solve...so much so that I spent weeks verifying that I had not, in fact, messed up the coefficient formulation. It was just very hard to solve efficiently. The only method that converged reasonably well was W-cycle, but for our large simulations, we needed to run in parallel and (at least at the time), W-cycle scaled poorly. V-cycle did not work well at all and often error-ed out due to some floating point over/underflow. We finally used F-cycle with the ILU(0) smoother and, maybe bicgstab for the outer iterative scheme with the AMG as a preconditioner and got reasonably good results.

So, if you have access to ILU for the MG smoother, maybe try that with F-cycle. That...if I recall correctly...made the most significant improvement. Adding bicgstab just shaved a bit off of the solution time when used with ILU, but did nothing to improve robustness. Again, these are 10-year memories, but I think this is mostly right.

Good luck.

[arjun]

Originally Posted by davidwilcox

did anybody ever have success by using the F cycle for pressure?

Yes. I think the default scheme for pressure solver for starccm is F and seeing that many users dont change defaults, it is a lot successful.

Originally Posted by davidwilcox

did you have to use small values for parameters like restriction and prolongation?

You dont need to do all that, in fact in many cases over relaxing type parameter helps a lot with cenvergence. That is prolongation is more than 1 time.

Restriction usually is not touched.

Originally Posted by davidwilcox

While this indeed helps, it does not always solve the problem. Please share your experiences?

Flow solvers convergence is most part have to do with over all algorithm out side of matrix solver.

PS

for pressure equation though, nature of linear solver can affect the convergence but for majority of cases it does not create divergence (As the outer algorithm takes care of things).