Low-Order Refined Preconditioning for Spectral/hp Element Method for Complex, 3D Geometries

Abstract

Low-order refined (LOR) preconditioning replaces a high-order operator with a low-order discretisation on a refined nodal mesh. For tensor-product elements, the two operators are spectrally equivalent with bounds independent of the polynomial order $P$, but the construction does not extend directly to simplex and mixed-element discretisations. This work makes two contributions: it extends LOR preconditioning to simplex and mixed-element discretisations, including triangular, tetrahedral, and prismatic elements, and establishes a generalised Vandermonde transformation linking the modal and nodal LOR formulations, showing that the resulting preconditioned spectra and Krylov convergence are independent of the high-order basis. Numerical experiments show controlled iteration growth on triangular meshes despite increasing condition number, and controlled iteration counts up to $P=5$ on tetrahedral, prismatic, and mixed-element meshes. A single algebraic multigrid V-cycle per outer iteration gives the best balance of iteration count and cost. The method is applied to a production incompressible Navier-Stokes simulation of a race-car front-wing and wheel configuration, discretised on a mesh of $2.87\times10^6$ mixed prismatic and tetrahedral elements giving $32.2\times10^6$ pressure degrees of freedom at $P=3$. LOR reduces the mean pressure conjugate gradient (CG) iteration count from $235.3$ to $5.5$, and the pressure-solve time over 1000 timesteps by 16.1%, relative to the default production static-condensation diagonal preconditioner in Nektar++. The one-time cost of constructing the LOR preconditioner is amortised over the production simulation.