Journal Article

Toward an h-Independent Algebraic Multigrid Method for Maxwell's Equations

Hu, Jonathan J., Bochev, Pavel B., Robinson, Allen C., Garasi, Christopher J., Tuminaro, Raymond S.

2006

Overview

We propose a new algebraic multigrid (AMG) method for solving the eddy current approximations to Maxwell's equations. This AMG method has its roots in an algorithm proposed by Reitzinger and Schoberl. The main focus in the Reitzinger and Schoberl method is to maintain null-space properties of the weak $\\nabla \\times \\nabla \\>{\\times}$ operator on coarse grids. While these null-space properties are critical, they are not enough to guarantee $h$-independent convergence rates of the overall multigrid scheme. We present a new strategy for choosing intergrid transfers that not only maintains the important null-space properties on coarse grids but also yields significantly improved multigrid convergence rates. This improvement is related to those we explored in a previous paper, but is fundamentally simpler, easier to compute, and performs better with respect to both multigrid operator complexity and convergence rates. The new strategy builds on ideas in smoothed aggregation to improve the approximation property of an existing interpolation operator. By carefully choosing the smoothing operators, we show how it is sometimes possible to achieve $h$-independent convergence rates with a modest increase in multigrid operator complexity. Though this ideal case is not always possible, the overall algorithm performs significantly better than the original scheme in both iterations and run time. Finally, the Reitzinger and Schoberl method, as well as our previous smoothed method, are shown to be special cases of this new algorithm.

• Publisher: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
• Subject: Algebra / Algorithms / Approximation / Computational methods in fluid dynamics / Exact sciences and technology / Fluid dynamics / Fundamental areas of phenomenology (including applications) / Laboratories / Mathematics / Methods / Numerical analysis / Numerical analysis. Scientific computation / Numerical linear algebra / Partial differential equations, boundary value problems / Physics / Sciences and techniques of general use