On element-by-element Schur complement approximations

We discuss a methodology to construct sparse approximations of Schur complements of two-by-two block matrices arising in Finite Element discretizations of partial differential equations. Earlier results from [2] are extended to more general symmetric positive definite matrices of two-by-two block form. The applicability of the method for general symmetric and nonsymmetric matrices is analysed. The paper demonstrates the applicability of the presented method providing extensive numerical experiments.