An Augmented Lagrangian Preconditioner for Navier–Stokes Equations With Runge–Kutta in Time

ABSTRACT We consider an implicit Runge–Kutta method for the numerical time integration of the nonstationary incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. This yields a sequence of nonlinear problems to be solved for the stages of the Runge–Kutta method. The resulting nonlinear system of differential equations is discretized using a finite element method. To compute a numerical approximation of the stages at each time step, we employ Newton's method, which requires the solution of a large and sparse generalized saddle‐point problem at each nonlinear iteration. We devise an augmented Lagrangian preconditioner within the flexible GMRES method for solving the Newton systems at each time step. The preconditioner can be applied inexactly with the help of a multigrid routine. We present numerical evidence of the robustness and efficiency of the proposed strategy for different values of the viscosity, mesh size, time step, and number of stages of the Runge–Kutta method.