Newton-Multigrid for Biological Reaction-Diffusion Problems with Random Coefficients

An algebraic Newton-multigrid method is proposed in order to efficiently solve systems of nonlinear reaction-diffusion problems with stochastic coefficients. These problems model the conversion of starch into sugars in growing apples. The stochastic system is first converted into a large coupled system of deterministic equationsby applying a stochastic Galerkin finite element discretization. This method leads to high-order accurate stochastic solutions. A stable and high-order time discretization is obtained by applying a fully implicit Runge-Kutta method. After Newton linearization, a point-based algebraic multigrid solution method is applied.In order to decrease the computational cost, alternative multigrid preconditioners are presented. Numerical results demonstrate the convergence properties, robustnessand efficiency of the proposed multigrid methods.status: publishe