Acceleration of nonlinear solvers for natural convection problems

Abstract This paper develops an efficient and robust solution technique for the steady Boussinesq model of non-isothermal flow using Anderson acceleration applied to a Picard iteration. After analyzing the fixed point operator associated with the nonlinear iteration to prove that certain stability and regularity properties hold, we apply the authors’ recently constructed theory for Anderson acceleration, which yields a convergence result for the Anderson accelerated Picard iteration for the Boussinesq system. The result shows that the leading term in the residual is improved by the gain in the optimization problem, but at the cost of additional higher order terms that can be significant when the residual is large. We perform numerical tests that illustrate the theory, and show that a 2-stage choice of Anderson depth can be advantageous. We also consider Anderson acceleration applied to the Newton iteration for the Boussinesq equations, and observe that the acceleration allows the Newton iteration to converge for significantly higher Rayleigh numbers that it could without acceleration, even with a standard line search.