On the preconditioners for fast multipole boundary element methods for 2D multi-domain elastostatics

Fast multipole method (FMM) has been successfully applied to accelerate the numerical solvers of boundary element method (BEM). However, the coefficient matrix implicitly formed by using FMM is sometimes ill-conditioned in cases when mixed boundary conditions exist, resulting in poor rate of convergence for iteration. So preconditioning is a critical part in the development of efficient FMM solver for BEM. In this paper, preconditioners based on sparse approximate inverse type are used for fast multipole BEM to deal with 2D elastostatics. Several sparsity patterns of the preconditioner are considered for single- and multi-domain problems, especially for 2D elastic body with large number of inclusions or cracks. Algorithms and cost analysis of preconditioning under different prescribed sparsity patterns are discussed. GMRES is used as the iterative solver. Numerical results show this type of preconditioner achieves satisfactory rate of convergence for fast multipole BEM and performs well for problems of fairly large sizes.