An analysis of element-by-element preconditioners for nonsymmetric problems (Q2367992)

For linear systems arising from the finite element discretization of elliptic boundary value problems the element-by-element preconditioner is quite popular for improving the convergence of iterative solvers. In this paper the author investigates the nonsymmetric case and derives an estimate for the condition number of the preconditioned stiffness matrix involving both the element stiffness matrices and the element preconditioning matrices. The results are used to suggest some modifications of the element-by- element preconditioner which are considered to be more robust for nonsymmetric problems. Numerical results are given for convection dominated convection-diffusion problems.