Algorithms for Parallel Fem Modelling of thermo-Mechanical Phenomena Arising from the Disposal of the Spent Nuclear Fuel

Abstract The analysis of stability and safety of underground repositories of the spent nuclear fuel requires the use of mathematical modelling of coupled T-H-M phenomena. The realization of reliable numerical simulations is a difficult task from many points of view including the aspect of high computational requirements concentrated mainly in the necessity of a repeated solution of large linear systems. In our contribution, we address this aspect and describe numerical methods based on the use of efficient iterative solvers, which exploit the conjugate gradient (CG) method, its generalization and the space decomposition preconditioners. The efficiency of these solvers will be illustrated by the solution of elasticity and thermo-elasticity problems arising from the finite element analysis of selected benchmarks with computations performed on a PC cluster. The introduced ideas could be useful also for the solution of more complicated coupled problems.