Parallel Overlapping Scheme for Viscous Incompressible Flows

A 3D parallel overlapping scheme for viscous incompressible flow problems is presented that combines the finite element method, which is best suited for analysing flow in any arbitrarily shaped flow geometry, with the finite difference method, which is advantageous in terms of both computing time and computer storage. A modified ABMAC method is used as the solution algorithm, to which a sophisticated time integration scheme proposed by the present authors has been applied. Parallelization is based on the domain decomposition method. The RGB (recursive graph bisection) algorithm is used for the decomposition of the FEM mesh and simple slice decomposition is used for the FDM mesh. Some estimates of the parallel performance of FEM, FDM and overlapping computations are presented. # 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.