An AMG saddle point preconditioner with application to mixed Poisson problems on adaptive quad/cube meshes

Abstract

We investigate various block preconditioners for a low-order Raviart-Thomas discretization of the mixed Poisson problem on adaptive quadrilateral meshes. In addition to standard diagonal and Schur complement preconditioners, we present a dedicated AMG solver for saddle point problems (SPAMG). A key element is a stabilized prolongation operator that couples the flux and scalar components. Our numerical experiments in 2D and 3D show that the SPAMG preconditioner displays nearly mesh-independent iteration counts for adaptive meshes and heterogeneous coefficients.