| Abstract: | This article is devoted to introduce a new approach to iterative substructuring methods that, without recourse to Lagrange multipliers, yields positive definite preconditioned formulations of the Neumann–Neumann and FETI types. To my knowledge, this is the first time that such formulations have been made without resource to Lagrange multipliers. A numerical advantage that is concomitant to such multipliers‐free formulations is the reduction of the degrees of freedom associated with the Lagrange multipliers. Other attractive features are their generality, directness, and simplicity. The general framework of the new approach is rather simple and stems directly from the discretization procedures that are applied; in it, the differential operators act on discontinuous piecewise‐defined functions. Then, the Lagrange multipliers are not required because in such an environment the functions‐discontinuities are not an anomaly that need to be corrected. The resulting algorithms and equations‐systems are also derived with considerable detail. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2008 |
