Substructuring preconditioners for the three fields domain decomposition methods

We study a class of preconditioners based on substructuring, for the discrete Steklov-Poincare operator arising in the three fields formulation of domain decomposition in two dimensions. Under extremely general assumptions on the discretization spaces involved, an upper bound is provided on the condition number of the preconditioned system, which is shown to grow at most as log(H=h)^2 (H and h denoting, respectively, the diameter and the discretization mesh-size of the subdomains). Extensive numerical tests performed on both a plain and a stabilized version of the method confirm the optimality of such bound.