Numerical solvers for a poromechanic problem with a moving boundary

Abstract

We study a poromechanic problem in presence of a moving boundary. The poroelastic material is described by means of the Biot model while the moving boundary accounts for the effect of surface erosion of the material. We focus on the numerical approximation of the problem, in the framework of the finite element method. To avoid re-meshing along with the evolution of the boundary, we adopt the cut finite element approach. The main issue of this strategy consists of the ill-conditioning of the finite element matrices in presence of cut elements of small size. We show, by means of numerical experiments and theory, that this issue significantly decreases the performance of the numerical solver. For this reason, we propose a strategy that allows to overcome the illconditioned behavior of the discrete problem. The resulting solver is based on the fixed stress approach, used to iteratively decompose the Biot equations, combined with the ghost penalty stabilization and preconditioning applied to the pressure and displacement sub-problems respectively.

Keywords

• poromechanics
• moving boundary
• fixed-stress approach
• cut finite elements
• preconditioning