The Analysis of Porous Media using the Mixed Finite Element Method and the FETI Method

Abstract

Porous media analysis is very difficult to accomplish using general solid mechanics theory, because saturated porous media is composed of different materials. Therefore, it is necessary to use porous theory considering solid mechanics and the fluid flow theory. Recently, in order to resolve this problem, the staggered method was proposed by Park and Tak [14]. However, the numerical efficiency is decreased because the iteration step in the staggered method is performed more than one time. Thus, in order to improve the numerical efficiency, a combined method is proposed by combining the finite element tearing and interconnecting (FETI) method with the staggered method for the efficient analysis of saturated porous media.