Parameter-free preconditioning for nearly-incompressible linear elasticity

Abstract: It is well known that via the augmented Lagrangian method, one can solve Stokes' system by solving the nearly incompressible linear elasticity equation. In this paper, we show that the converse holds, and approximate the inverse of the linear elasticity operator with a convex linear combination of parameter-free operators. In such a way, we construct a uniform preconditioner for linear elasticity for all values of the Lam\'{e} parameter $\lambda\in [0,\infty)$. Numerical results confirm that by using inf-sup stable finite-element spaces for the solution of Stokes' equations, the proposed preconditioner is robust in $\lambda$.