Multilevel methods for the h-, p-, and hp-versions of the boundary element method

AbstractIn this paper we give an overview on the definition of finite element spaces for the h-, p-, and hp-version of the BEM along with preconditioners of additive Schwarz type. We consider screen problems (with a hypersingular or a weakly singular integral equation of first kind on an open surface Γ) as model problems. For the hypersingular integral equation and the h-version with piecewise bilinear functions on a coarse and a fine grid we analyze a preconditioner by iterative substructuring based on a non-overlapping decomposition of Γ. We prove that the condition number of the preconditioned linear system behaves polylogarithmically in H/h. Here H is the size of the subdomains and h is the size of the elements. For the hp-version and the hypersingular integral equation we comment in detail on an additive Schwarz preconditioner which uses piecewise polynomials of high degree on the fine grid and yields also a polylogarithmically growing condition number. For the weakly singular integral equation, where no continuity of test and trial functions across the element boundaries has to been enforced, the method works for nonuniform degree distributions as well. Numerical results supporting our theory are reported

An overlapping additive Schwarz preconditioner for boundary element approximations to the Laplace screen and Lamé crack problems

We study a two-level overlapping additive Schwarz preconditioner for the h-version of the Galerkin boundary element method when used to solve hypersingular integral equations of the first kind on an open surface in ℝ3. These integral equations result from Neumann problems for the Laplace and Lamé equations in the exterior of the surface. We prove that the condition number of the preconditioned system is bounded by O(1 + log2(H/δ)), where H denotes the diameter of the subdomains and δ the size of the overlap

Stable multilevel splittings of boundary edge element spaces

We establish the stability of nodal multilevel decompositions of lowest-order conforming boundary element subspaces of the trace space ${\boldsymbol{H}}^{-\frac {1}{2}}(\operatorname {div}_{\varGamma },{\varGamma })$ of ${\boldsymbol{H}}(\operatorname {\bf curl},{\varOmega })$ on boundaries of triangulated Lipschitz polyhedra. The decompositions are based on nested triangular meshes created by uniform refinement and the stability bounds are uniform in the number of refinement levels. The main tool is the general theory of P.Oswald (Interface preconditioners and multilevel extension operators, in Proc. 11th Intern. Conf. on Domain Decomposition Methods, London, 1998, pp.96-103) that teaches, when stability of decompositions of boundary element spaces with respect to trace norms can be inferred from corresponding stability results for finite element spaces. ${\boldsymbol{H}}(\operatorname {\bf curl},{\varOmega })$ -stable discrete extension operators are instrumental in this. Stable multilevel decompositions immediately spawn subspace correction preconditioners whose performance will not degrade on very fine surface meshes. Thus, the results of this article demonstrate how to construct optimal iterative solvers for the linear systems of equations arising from the Galerkin edge element discretization of boundary integral equations for eddy current problem

Fast Numerical Methods for Non-local Operators

[no abstract available