Parallel Multilevel Preconditioners for Problems of Thin Smooth Shells

In the last years multilevel preconditioners like BPX became more and more popular for solving second-order elliptic finite element discretizations by iterative methods. P. Oswald has adapted these methods for discretizations of the fourth order biharmonic problem by rectangular conforming Bogner-Fox-Schmidt elements and nonconforming Adini elements and has derived optimal estimates for the condition numbers of the preconditioned linear systems. In this paper we generalize the results from Oswald to the construction of BPX and Multilevel Diagonal Scaling (MDS-BPX) preconditioners for the elasticity problem of thin smooth shells of arbitrary forms where we use Koiter's equations of equilibrium for an homogeneous and isotropic thin shell, clamped on a part of its boundary and loaded by a resultant on its middle surface. We use the two discretizations mentioned above and the preconditioned conjugate gradient method as iterative method. The parallelization concept is based on a non-overlapping domain decomposition data structure. We describe the implementations of the multilevel preconditioners. Finally, we show numerical results for some classes of shells like plates, cylinders, and hyperboloids