On the efficient preconditioning of the Stokes equations in tight geometries

It is known (see, e.g., [SIAM J. Matrix Anal. Appl. 2014;35(1):143‐173]) that the performance of iterative methods for solving the Stokes problem essentially depends on the quality of the preconditioner for the Schur complement matrix, . In this paper, we consider two preconditioners for : the identity one and the SIMPLE one, and numerically study their performance for solving the Stokes problem in tight geometries. The latter are characterized by a high surface‐to‐volume ratio. We show that for such geometries, can become severely ill‐conditioned, having a very large condition number and a significant portion of non‐unit eigenvalues. As a consequence, the identity matrix, which is broadly used as a preconditioner for solving the Stokes problem in simple geometries, becomes very inefficient. We show that there is a correlation between the surface‐to‐volume ratio and the condition number of S: the latter increases with the increase of the former. We show that the condition number of the diffusive SIMPLE‐preconditioned Schur complement matrix remains bounded when the surface‐to‐volume ratio increases, which explains the robust performance of this preconditioner for tight geometries. Further on, we use a direct method to calculate the full spectrum of and show that there is a correlation between the number of its non‐unit eigenvalues and the number of grid points at which no‐slip boundary conditions are prescribed. To illustrate the above findings, we examine the Pressure Schur Complement formulation for staggered finite‐difference discretization of the Stokes equations and solve it with the preconditioned conjugate gradient method. The practical problem which is of interest to us is computing the permeability of tight rocks.