The LIR space partitioning system applied to the Stokes equations

We introduce a novel approach to solve the stationary Stokes equations on very large voxel geometries. One main idea is to coarsen a voxel geometry in areas where velocity does not vary much while keeping the original resolution near the solid surfaces. For spatial partitioning a simplified LIR-tree is used which is a generalization of the Octree and KD-tree. The other main idea is to arrange variables in a way such that each cell is able to satisfy the Stokes equations independently. Pressure and velocity are ciiscretizeci on staggered grids. But instead of using one velocity variable on the cell surface we introduce two variables. The discretization of momentum and mass conservation yields a small linear system (block) per cell that allows to use the block Gauss-Seidel algorithm as iterative solver. We compare our method to other solvers and conclude superior performance in runtime and memory for high porosity geometries. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.