A parallel fully coupled implicit domain decomposition method for numerical simulation of microfluidic mixing in 3D

A parallel fully coupled implicit fluid solver based on a Newton–Krylov–Schwarz algorithm is developed on top of the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific computation for the simulation of microfluidic mixing described by the three-dimensional unsteady incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. The popularly used fractional step method, originally designed for high Reynolds number flows, requires some modification of the inviscid-type pressure boundary condition in order to reduce the divergence error near the wall. On the other hand, the fully coupled approach works well without any special treatment of the boundary condition for low Reynolds number microchannel flows. A key component of the algorithm is an additive Schwarz preconditioner, which is used to accelerate the convergence of a linear Krylov-type solver for the saddle-point-type Jacobian systems. As a test case, we carefully study a three-dimensional passive serpentine micromixer and report the parallel performance of the algorithm obtained on a parallel machine with more than one hundred processors.