A BDDC Method for Mortar Discretizations Using a Transformation of Basis

A BDDC (balancing domain decomposition by constraints) method is developed for elliptic equations, with discontinuous coefficients, discretized by mortar finite element methods for geometrically nonconforming partitions in both two and three space dimensions. The coarse component of the preconditioner is defined in terms of one mortar constraint for each edge/face, which is the intersection of the boundaries of a pair of subdomains. A condition number bound of the form C maxi{(1 + log(Hi/hi))} is established under certain assumptions on the geometrically nonconforming subdomain partition in the three-dimensional case. Here Hi and hi are the subdomain diameters and the mesh sizes, respectively. In the geometrically conforming case and the geometrically nonconforming cases in two dimensions, no assumptions on the subdomain partition are required. This BDDC preconditioner is also shown to be closely related to the Neumann–Dirichlet version of the FETI-DP algorithm. The results are illustrated by numerical experiments which confirm the theoretical results.