Projected Schur complement method for solving non-symmetric systems arising from a smooth fictitious domain approach

Abstract

This paper deals with a fast method for solving large-scale algebraic saddle-point systems arising from fictitious domain formulations of elliptic boundary value problems. A new variant of the fictitious domain approach is analyzed. Boundary conditions are enforced by control variables introduced on an auxiliary boundary located outside the original domain. This approach has a significantly higher convergence rate; however, the algebraic systems resulting from finite element discretizations are typically non-symmetric. The presented method is based on the Schur complement reduction. If the stiffness matrix is singular, the reduced system can be formulated again as another saddle-point problem. Its modification by orthogonal projectors leads to an equation that can be efficiently solved using a projected Krylov subspace method for non-symmetric operators. For this purpose, the projected variant of the BiCGSTAB algorithm is derived from the non-projected one. The behavior of the method is illustrated by examples, in which the BiCGSTAB iterations are accelerated by a multigrid strategy. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.