Effect of aspect ratio and number of meshes on convergence of steady-state flow calculation using Newton-Raphson iterative procedure

In this paper, we discuss the stability of the convergence of a nonlinear iteration procedure which may be affected by a large number of numerical factors in a complicated way. A numerical parallel channel flow problem is solved using the finite element method and the Newton-Raphson iteration procedure. The numerical factors, on which we focus attention in this study, are the aspect ratio of the channel and the number of divided meshes. We propose a nondimensional value, which is obtained from the Reynolds number, the aspect ratio and the number of meshes. The results of the numerical experiment show that the threshold of divergence in the iteration is indicated clearly by the present nondimensional value. (author)