Formulation and analysis of a Schur complement method for fluid-structure interaction

Abstract: This work presents a strongly coupled partitioned method for fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems based on a monolithic formulation of the system which employs a Lagrange multiplier. We prove that both the semi-discrete and fully discrete formulations are well-posed. To derive a partitioned scheme, a Schur complement equation, which implicitly expresses the Lagrange multiplier and the fluid pressure in terms of the fluid velocity and structural displacement, is constructed based on the monolithic FSI system. Solving the Schur complement system at each time step allows for the decoupling of the fluid and structure subproblems, making the method non-iterative between subdomains. We investigate bounds for the condition number of the Schur complement matrix and present initial numerical results to demonstrate the performance of our approach, which attains the expected convergence rates.