Open Access

Artur Walter

• A variety of secant methods has been revisited in view of the construction of iterative solvers for large nonsymmetric linear systems $ Ax = b $ stemming from the discretization of convection diffusion equations. In the first section, we tried to approximate $ A ^{-1} $ directly. Since the sparsity structure of A- is not known, additional storage vectors are needed during the iteration. In the next section, an incomplete factorization $ LU $ of $ A $ is the starting point and we tried to improve this easy invertible approximation of $ A $. The update is constructed in such a way that the sparsity structure of $ L $ and $ U $ is maintained. Two different sparsity preserving updates are investigated from theoretical and practical point of view. Numerical experiments on discretized PDEs of convection diffusion type in 2- D with internal layers and on "arbitrary" matrices with symmetric sparsity structure are given. {\bf Key words:} nonsymmetric linear system, sparse secant method, Broyden's method, incomplete factorization.