Coupled Boundary and Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting Methods

Abstract

We have recently introduced the Boundary Element Tearing and Interconnecting (BETI) methods as boundary element counterparts of the wellestablished Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting (FETI) methods. Since Finite Element Methods (FEM) and Boundary Element Methods (BEM) have certain complementary properties, it is sometimes very useful to couple these discretization techniques and to benefit from both worlds. Combining our BETI techniques with the FETI methods gives new, quite attractive tearing and interconnecting parallel solvers for large scale coupled boundary and finite element equations. There is an unified framework for coupling, handling, and analyzing both methods. In particular, the FETI methods can benefit from preconditioning components constructed by boundary element techniques. This is especially true for sparse versions of the boundary element method such as the fast multipole method which avoid fully populated matrices arising in classical boundary element methods.