A parallel matrix-free conservative solution interpolation on unstructured tetrahedral meshes

• Published in: Computer methods in applied mechanics and engineering 2016-02, Vol.299, p.116-142
• Main Author: Alauzet, Frédéric
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computer Science; Conservation laws; Mathematics; Matrix-free conservative interpolation; Mesh adaptation; Modeling and Simulation; Numerical Analysis; Parallel interpolation; Solution interpolation; Unstructured mesh
• ISSN: 0045-7825; 1879-2138
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cma.2015.10.012

This document presents an interpolation operator on unstructured tetrahedral meshes that satisfies the properties of mass conservation, P1-exactness (order 2) and maximum principle. Interpolation operators are important for many applications in scientific computing. For instance, in the context of anisotropic mesh adaptation for time-dependent problems, the interpolation stage becomes crucial as the error due to solution transfer accumulates throughout the simulation. This error can eventually spoil the overall solution accuracy. When dealing with conservation laws in CFD, solution accuracy requires enforcement of mass preservation throughout the computation, in particular in long time scale computations. In the proposed approach, the conservation property is achieved by local mesh intersection and quadrature formulae. Derivatives reconstruction is used to obtain a second order method. Algorithmically, our goal is to design a method which is robust and efficient. The robustness is mandatory to obtain a reliable method on real-life applications and to apply the operator to highly anisotropic meshes. The efficiency is achieved by designing a matrix-free operator which is highly parallel. A multi-thread parallelization is given in this work. Several numerical examples are presented to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.