Schwarz preconditioners for the spectral element discretization of the steady Stokes and Navier-Stokes equations (Q5946649)

A domain decomposition method based on the Schwarz preconditioner for the spectral element discretization of the Stokes and Navier-Stokes equations is considered. The original system is reduced to a symmetric equation for the velocity, which can be solved by a conjugate gradient method. For the stationary Navier-Stokes equations in each Newton step a non-symmetric indefinite problem is solved using a Schwarz preconditioner. By using an especially designed low-order global space, and the solution of local problems analogous to those for the Stokes equations a complete theory is presented. It is shown that the number of GMRES iterations at each Newton step is only increasing logarithmically. This bound does not depend on the number of subdomains, and it does not deteriorate as the Newton iteration proceeds.