We give some estimates related to nite element multilevel splittings and Sobolev norms of negative order. Basically, results for the positive order case are carried over by duality. In particular, semi-orthogonal splittings based on piecewise constants are studied for Sobolev spaces of order ;1=2. Numerical experiments are provided for the screen problem. AMS Subject Classi cation: 65F10, 65F35, 65N22, 65N30. Key words: Preconditioning, boundary element discretizations, multilevelmethods, Sobolev spaces, screen problems.
P. Oswald