Optimal Preconditioners for Finite Element Approximations of Convection-Diffusion Equations on structured meshes

The paper is devoted to the spectral analysis of effective preconditioners for linear systems obtained via a Finite Element approximation to diffusion-dominated convection-diffusion equations. We consider a model setting in which the structured finite element partition is made by equi-lateral triangles. Under such assumptions, if the problem is coercive, and the diffusive and convective coefficients are regular enough, then the proposed preconditioned matrix sequences exhibit a strong clustering at unity, the preconditioning matrix sequence and the original matrix sequence are spectrally equivalent, and the eigenvector matrices have a mild conditioning. The obtained results allow to show the optimality of the related preconditioned Krylov methods. %It is important to stress that The interest of such a study relies on the observation that automatic grid generators tend to construct equi-lateral triangles when the mesh is fine enough. Numerical tests, both on the model setting and in the non-structured case, show the effectiveness of the proposal and the correctness of the theoretical findings.