Domain decomposition methods for the coupling of surface and groundwater flows

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate, from both the mathematical and numerical viewpoint, the coupling of surface and porous media flows, with particular concern on environmental applications. Domain decomposition methods are applied to set up effective iterative algorithms for the numerical solution of the global problem. To this aim, we reformulate the coupled problem in terms of an interface (Steklov-Poincaré) equation and we investigate the properties of the Steklov-Poincaré operators in order to characterize optimal preconditioners that, at the discrete level, yield convergence in a number of iterations independent of the mesh size h. We consider a new approach to the classical Robin-Robin method and we reinterpret it as an alternating direction iterative algorithm. This allows us to characterize robust preconditioners for the linear Stokes/Darcy problem which improve the behaviour of the classical Dirichlet- Neumann and Neumann-Neumann ones. Several numerical tests are presented to assess the convergence properties of the proposed algorithms. Finally, the nonlinear Navier-Stokes/Darcy coupling is investigated and a general nonlinear domain decomposition strategy is proposed for the solution of the interface problem, extending the usual Newton or fixed-point based algorithms.