without much effort, such as fluid entry resistance [2, 3]). The recent literature contains various numer-
ical methods for (Navier-)Stokes/Biot interface formulations including mixed, double mixed, monolithic,
segregated, conforming, non-conforming, and DG discretizations [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15].
In [12, 16] (and starting from the Biot-Stokes equations advanced in [5, 17]) the authors rewrite the
poroelasticity equations using displacement, fluid pressure and total pressure (also as in the poromechanics
formulations from [18, 19, 20]). Since fluid pressure in the poroelastic domain has sufficient regularity, no
Lagrange multipliers are needed to enforce the coupling conditions, which resembles the different formulations
for Stokes-Darcy advanced in [21, 22, 23, 24]. Another advantage of the three-field Biot formulation is its
robustness with respect to the Lam´e constants of the poroelastic structure. This robustness is of particular
importance when we test the flow response to changes in the material properties of the skeleton and when the
solid is nearly incompressible. The work [12] focuses on the stability analysis and its precise implications on
the asymptotics of the interface conditions when the permeability depends on porosity heterogeneity, whereas
[16] addresses the stability of the semi- and fully discrete problems, and the application to interfacial flow
in the eye. Here, we extend these works by concentrating on deriving robust stability, on designing efficient
block preconditioners (robust with respect to all material parameters) following the general theoretical
formalism from [25], and on the simulation of free flow interacting with interstitial flow in the brain. In
such a context (and in the wider class of problems we consider in this paper), tissue permeability is of
the order of 10
−15
m
2
, and the incorporation of tangential interface transmission conditions usually involves
terms that scale inversely proportional to the square root of permeability. Moreover, the solid is nearly
incompressible, making the first Lam´e parameter significantly larger than the other mechanical parameters
and exhibiting volumetric locking for some types of displacement-based formulations. Other flow regimes
that are challenging include low-storage cases [26]. It is then important that the stability and convergence
of the numerical approximations are preserved within the parameter ranges of interest.
Here we follow [27, 28, 20, 29] and use parameter-weighted norms to achieve robustness. However, as we
will see, combining proper preconditioners for Stokes and Biot single-physics problems is not sufficient for the
interface coupled problem. In fact, the condition number of the preconditioned system, although robust in
mesh size, grows like the square root of the ratio between fluid viscosity and permeability. This phenomenon
is demonstrated in Example 2.1, below. That is, the efficiency of seemingly natural preconditioners varies
with the material parameters. In order to regain stability with respect to all parameters, we include both an
additional fractional term involving the pressure and a metric term coupling the tangential fluid velocity and
solid displacement at the interface, hereby increasing the regularity at the interface in a proper parameter
dependent manner. This strategy draws inspiration from similar approaches employed in the design of robust
solvers for Darcy and Stokes-Darcy couplings [30, 21, 23].
1.2. Outline
We have organised the contents of this paper in the following manner. The remainder of this section
contains preliminaries on notation and functional spaces to be used throughout the manuscript. Section 2
outlines the main details of the balance equations, stating typical interfacial and boundary conditions,
and restricting the discussion to the steady Biot-Stokes coupled problem. There we also include the weak
formulation and demonstrate that simple diagonal preconditioners based on standard norms do not lead
to robustness over the whole parameter range. This issue is addressed in Section 3 where we show well-
posedness of the system using a global inf-sup argument with parameter weighted operators in fractional
spaces, which in turn assist in the design of robust solvers by operator preconditioning. Section 4 discusses
finite element discretization of the coupled problem using both conforming and non-conforming elements;
and it also contains numerical experiments demonstrating robustness of the fractional preconditioner and its
feasibility for simplified simulations of interfacial flow in the brain.
1.3. Preliminaries
Let us consider a spatial domain Ω ⊂ R
d
, where d = 2, 3, disjointly split into Ω
F
and Ω
P
. These sub-
domains respectively represent the region filled with an incompressible fluid and the elastic porous medium
2
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