Additive Schwarz Preconditioners for the Obstacle Problem of Clamped Kirchhoff Plates

Abstract: When the obstacle problem of clamped Kirchhoff plates is discretized by a partition of unity method, the resulting discrete variational inequalities can be solved by a primal-dual active set algorithm. In this paper we develop and analyze additive Schwarz preconditioners for the systems that appear in each iteration of the primal-dual active set algorithm. Numerical results that corroborate the theoretical estimates are also presented.