C. Farhat et M. Geradin, ON THE GENERAL-SOLUTION BY A DIRECT METHOD OF A LARGE-SCALE SINGULAR SYSTEM OF LINEAR-EQUATIONS - APPLICATION TO THE ANALYSIS OF FLOATING STRUCTURES, International journal for numerical methods in engineering, 41(4), 1998, pp. 675-696
Finding the general solution of a singular system of linear equations
requires computing a particular solution and a basis of the null space
of the corresponding singular matrix. In this paper, we consider the
case where the singular matrix is large and sparse, and the applicatio
n calls for a direct solution method. We highlight the dependence of s
traight forward factorization algorithms on an arbitrary constant that
can influence the correctness of the computed solution, and describe
a family of improved direct solution methods that alleviate this probl
em. For structural mechanics applications, we propose a hybrid geometr
ic-algebraic method that is more robust than the purely algebraic dire
ct methods that are currently used for solving singular sparse systems
of equations. We illustrate the potential of our proposed solution al
gorithms with examples from structural mechanics and domain-decomposit
ion-based iterative solvers. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.