Partitioned but strongly coupled iteration schemes for nonlinear fluid-structure interaction

We look at the computational procedure of computing the response of a coupled fluid-structure interaction problem. We use the so-called strong fluid-structure coupling-a totally implicit formulation. At each time step in an implicit formulation, new values for the solution variables have to be computed by solving a nonlinear system of equations, where we assume that we have solvers for the subproblems. This is often the case, when we have existing software to solve each subproblem separately, and want to couple both. We show how to solve the overall nonlinear system by using only the solvers for the subproblems. This is achieved not by considering the equilibrium equations, but the fixed-point problem resulting from the solution iteration for each of the subproblems. (C) 2002 Civil-Comp Ltd. and Elsevier Science Ltd. All tights reserved.