Static condensation, partial orthogonalization of basis functions, and ILU preconditioning in the \(hp\)-FEM (Q930720)

The authors propose the \(hp\)-FEM (a modern version of the finite element method) capable of achieving exceptionally fast convergence through optimal variation of the size and polynomial degree of the elements. The presence of the so-called bubble functions (higher-degree basis functions local to element interiors) yields a special \(2\times 2\) block structure of the stiffness matrix which can be utilized to ease the solution of the discrete problem. Static condensation of internal degrees of freedom, partial orthogonalization of basis functions, and ILU preconditioning are techniques used to facilitate the solution of the discrete problems obtained in the \(hp\)-FEM. The static condensation of internal degrees of freedom, partial orthogonalization of basic functions, and ILU preconditioning are precisely described. Main result: For bounded and coercive (or nonnegative) bilinear forms \(a(u,v)\) on the Hilbert space \(V\) this paper shows that under mild technical assumptions, these presented three techniques are completely equivalent (here the same matrices can be obtained by the same arithmetic operations). Finally the authors perform a simple numerical experiment to compare the performance of the static condensation and of the straightforward (inefficient) implementation of the ILU for the linear system \(\mathbf{A}\mathbf{Y}=\mathbf{F}\), where the stiffness matrix \(\mathbf{A} \in\mathbb R^{N \times N}\) and the load vector \(\mathbf{F}\) have the entries \(\mathbf{A}_{ij}=a(\varphi_i , \varphi_j)\) and \(\mathbf{F}=\mathcal{F}(\varphi_i),i,j = 1,2, \ldots N\). The tested linear system comes from the \(hp\)-FEM discretization of the Poisson equation with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions in a square domain.