Multilevel preconditioning based on discrete symmetrization for convection-diffusion equations

The subject of this paper is an additive multilevel preconditioning approach for convection-diffusion problems. Our particular interest is in the convergence behavior for convection-dominated problems which are discretized by the streamline diffusion method. The multilevel preconditioner is based on a transformation of the discrete problem which reduces the relative size of the skew-symmetric part of the operator. For the constant coefficient case, an analysis of the convergence properties of this multilevel preconditioner is given in terms of its dependence on the convection size. Moreover, the results of computational experiments for more general convection-diffusion problems are presented and our new preconditioner is compared to standard multilevel preconditioning.