A fast iterative method for solving stationary heat conduction problems on regions partitioned into rectangles

Summary The paper deals with some finite element approximation of stationary heat conduction problems on regions which can be partitioned into rectangular subregions. By a special superelement-technique employing fast elimination of the inner nodal parameters, the original finite element problem is reduced to a smaller problem, which is only connected with the nodes on the boundary of the superelements. To solve the reduced system of finite element equations, an efficient iterative algorithm is proposed. This algorithm is based either on the conjugate gradient method or the Tshebysheff method, using a special matrix by vector multiplication procedure. The explicit form of the matrix is not used. The presented numerical method is asymptotically optimal with respect to the memory requirement as well as to the operation count.