Boundary element preconditioners for a hypersingular integral equation on an interval

We propose an almost optimal preconditioner for the iterative solution of the Galerkin equations arising from a hypersingular integral equation on an interval. This preconditioning technique, which is based on the single layer potential, was already studied for closed curves [11,14]. For a boundary element trial space, we show that the condition number is of order (1 + | log h_min|)², where h_min is the length of the smallest element. The proof requires only a mild assumption on the mesh, easily satisfied by adaptive refinement algorithms.