A robust preconditioner for high-contrast problems (research)

Abstract

This paper concerns robust numerical treatment of an elliptic PDE with high contrast coefficients. A finite-element discretization of such an equation yields a linear system whose conditioning worsens as the variations in the values of PDE coefficients becomes large. This paper introduces a procedure by which the discrete system obtained from a linear finite element discretization of the given continuum problem is converted into an equivalent linear system of the saddle point type. Then a robust preconditioner for the Lanczos method of minimized iterations for solving the derived saddle point problem is proposed. Robustness with respect to the contrast parameter and the mesh size is justified. Numerical examples support theoretical results and demonstrate independence of the number of iterations on the contrast, the mesh size and also on the different contrasts on the inclusions.