An overlapping domain decomposition preconditioner for high order BEM with anisotropic elements (Q1872002)

The authors are concerned with the preconditioning of linear systems which stem from the Galerkin boundary element method (BEM) for hypersingular integral equations of the first kind on surfaces in \({\mathbb R}^3\). The underlying meshes can be non-uniform with distorted elements. Their attention is focused on additive Schwarz-type preconditioners which use subdomain decompositions with small overlap. For the \(h\)-version of the finite element method, this strategy and corresponding analysis can be found in the paper of \textit{M. Dryja} and \textit{O. B. Widlund} [SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 15, 604-620 (1994; Zbl 0802.65119)], where all the details are provided in two dimensions and the three-dimensional situation is just briefly sketched. In the present paper the authors analyze the BEM for three-dimensional problems, thus dealing with trace spaces on surfaces. The authors consider piecewise polynomial spaces with arbitrary but uniform polynomial degrees, and their results are valid for anisotropic elements as long as the subdomain decomposition is locally quasi-uniform. It is required that triangles do not lie in the overlapping regions, being these parts only covered by quadrilaterals. Denoting the subdomain sizes by \(H_j\) and the overlaps by \(\delta_j\), it is proved that the condition number of the preconditioned system is bounded essentially by \(\max_j O(1+\log(H_j/\delta_j))^2\). Numerical results are presented in the last section.