5.1Structure of matrices

As described in Sec. 3.4 , a matrix equation for solution variable contains of a set of coeﬃcients where each row corresponds to the linear equation for the cell with index as follows:

 (5.1)

Matrix sparsity

Imagine creating a matrix equation for a transport equation for a scalar ﬁeld, e.g. Eq. (2.65 ) with zero heat source .

The ﬁgure shows a matrix of size , where is the number of cells. Circles denote non-zero coeﬃcients, which are ﬁlled for the diagonal coeﬃcients (). The matrix is sparse, i.e. the majority of the coeﬃcients are 0 (zero).

The sparsity is due to each cell interacting only with adjacent cells connected through its faces. For example, a 3D mesh of hexahedral cells produces up to 7 coeﬃcients per matrix row, with one diagonal coeﬃcient corresponding to a particular cell and 6 oﬀ-diagonal coeﬃcients for the neighbour cells.

Matrix (a)symmetry

A symmetric matrix possesses the same coeﬃcients across the diagonal, i.e. . The discretisation of a Laplacian term, e.g. , described in Sec. 3.7 , produces coeﬃcients that are symmetric because the surface normal gradient Eq. (3.5 ) uses the current and neighbour cell values in equal measure.

However, the discretisation of an advection term, e.g. , generally produces asymmetric coeﬃcients. For example, if the upwind scheme is applied for ﬂow from cell 1 into cell 2, then there would a contribution to but not to .

Matrix size

Parallel simulation allows aﬀordable solution on huge meshes. For a mesh of size , the matrix would have coeﬃcients, typically with that are are non-zero.

For reasons of eﬃciency, zero coeﬃcients are not stored in the computer’s memory. Instead the storage provides an array of non-zero coeﬃcients and addressing arrays of the corresponding row and column indices for each coeﬃcient.

Notes on CFD: General Principles - 5.1 Structure of matrices