Advances in the simulation of viscoplastic fluid flows using interior-point methods

We present a primal–dual interior point algorithm for the resolution of steady-state viscoplastic fluid flows formulated as a conic optimization problem. We give a complete description of the algorithm including some advanced aspects such as a predictor–corrector and scaling scheme to improve its efficiency. Our interior-point approach is shown to be largely more efficient than Augmented Lagrangian (AL) approaches which are traditionally used to solve such problems. In particular, the interior-point approach is roughly 5 times faster than the modern accelerated version of AL algorithms. The yield surfaces are shown to be accurately predicted and various examples ranging from channel flows to three-dimensional flows through a porous medium demonstrate its efficiency.