Convergence of the Dirichlet-Neumann method for semilinear elliptic equations

TL;DR

This paper proves the convergence of the Dirichlet-Neumann method for a class of semilinear elliptic equations in two and three dimensions, extending known results beyond linear cases.

Contribution

It introduces a new convergence proof for nonlinear iterations in Hilbert spaces and applies it to the Dirichlet-Neumann method for semilinear elliptic equations.

Findings

Convergence established for semilinear elliptic equations in 2D and 3D.

New theoretical result on nonlinear iteration convergence in Hilbert spaces.

Extension of convergence results beyond one-dimensional cases.

Abstract

The Dirichlet-Neumann method is a common domain decomposition method for nonoverlapping domain decomposition and the method has been studied extensively for linear elliptic equations. However, for nonlinear elliptic equations, there are only convergence results for some specific cases in one spatial dimension. The aim of this manuscript is therefore to prove that the Dirichlet-Neumann method converges for a class of semilinear elliptic equations on Lipschitz continuous domains in two and three spatial dimensions. This is achieved by first proving a new result on the convergence of nonlinear iterations in Hilbert spaces and then applying this result to the Steklov-Poincar\'e formulation of the Dirichlet-Neumann method.