Application of the incomplete Cholesky factorization preconditioned Krylov subspace method to the vector finite element method for 3-D electromagnetic scattering problems

The incomplete Cholesky (IC) factorization preconditioning technique is applied to the Krylov subspace methods for solving large systems of linear equations resulted from the use of edge-based finite element method (FEM). The construction of the preconditioner is based on the fact that the coefficient matrix is represented in an upper triangular compressed sparse row (CSR) form. An efficient implementation of the IC factorization is described in detail for complex symmetric matrices. With some ordering schemes our IC algorithm can greatly reduce the memory requirement as well as the iteration numbers. Numerical tests on harmonic analysis for plane wave scattering from a metallic plate and a metallic sphere coated by a lossy dielectric layer show the efficiency of this method. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.