Spectral properties of primal-based penalty preconditioners for saddle point problems

For large and sparse saddle point linear systems, this paper gives further spectral properties of the primal-based penalty preconditioners introduced in [C.R. Dohrmann, R.B. Lehoucq, A primal-based penalty preconditioner for elliptic saddle point systems, SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 44 (2006) 270–282]. The regions containing the real and non-real eigenvalues of the preconditioned matrix are obtained. The model of the Stokes problem is supplemented to illustrate the theoretical results and to test the quality of the primal-based penalty preconditioner.