Iterative solution of high-order boundary element method for acoustic impedance boundary value problems

A high-order boundary element method for time-harmonic acoustic impedance boundary value problems is presented. The method is based on the Galerkin-type formulation of the Burton-Miller integral equation (BMIE) with high-order polynomial basis and testing functions. This formulation has several important advantages: It is free of the interior resonance problem, the hypersingular integral operator of the traditional BMIE formulation can be avoided, it leads to faster convergence in terms of the number of unknowns than the low-order methods and it shows a good performance with iterative solvers. To avoid the numerical difficulties associated to the implementation of the singular surface integral equations, the singularity extraction technique is applied to evaluate the integrals in the singular and near-singular cases. The resulting matrix equation is solved iteratively with the generalized minimal residual method (GMRES) and a simple preconditioner based on the incomplete LU factorization is applied to expedite the convergence. Numerical results indicate that the BMIE formulation with Galerkin method and high-order basis functions has good convergence properties for various geometries and boundary conditions on a wide frequency range when the GMRES method is applied to solve the matrix equation iteratively. This, in turn, indicates that the formulation is well suited for an efficient application of fast solution procedures, such as the fast multipole method. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.