Preconditioners for Incompressible Navier-Stokes Solvers

In this paper we give an overview of the present state of fast solvers for the solution of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations discretized by the finite element method and linearized by Newton or Picard's method. It is shown that block precon- ditioners form an excellent approach for the solution, however if the grids are not to fine preconditioning with a Saddle point ILU matrix (SILU) may be an attractive al- ternative. The applicability of all methods to stabilized elements is investigated. In case of the stand-alone Stokes equations special preconditioners increase the efficiency considerably.