Block symmetric-triangular preconditioners for generalized saddle point linear systems from piezoelectric equations

Abstract

Based on the symmetric-triangular (ST) decomposition technique, a class of block ST (BST) preconditioners are proposed for generalized saddle point linear systems arising from the meshfree discretization of piezoelectric equations. By applying the BST preconditioners, we first transform the generalized saddle point linear systems into symmetric positive definite ones, which then can be solved in a fast and efficient way by the classical conjugate gradient (CG) or the preconditioned CG (PCG) iteration methods. Two practical BST preconditioners are presented and analyzed in detail. Eigen-properties and upper bounds of the condition numbers of the preconditioned matrices are proved. Implementation aspects are discussed. Finally, two numerical experiments arising from the piezoelectric strip shear deformation problem and the piezoelectric strip bending problem are presented. Numerical results show that the iteration steps of the PCG methods are independent of the number of degrees of freedom and the proposed BST preconditioners perform much better than some existing preconditioning techniques.