Absorbing boundary conditions for time harmonic wave propagation in discretized domains

While many successful absorbing boundary conditions (ABCs) are developed to simulate wave propagation into unbounded domains, most of them ignore the effect of interior discretization and result in spurious reflections at the artificial boundary. We tackle this problem by developing ABCs directly for the discretized wave equation. Specifically, we show that the discrete system (mesh) can be stretched in a non-trivial way to preserve the discrete impedance at the interface. Similar to the perfectly matched layers (PML) for continuous wave equation, the stretch is designed to introduce dissipation in the exterior, resulting in a PML-type ABC for discrete media. The paper includes detailed formulation of the new discrete ABC, along with the illustration of its effectiveness over continuous ABCs with the help of error analysis and numerical experiments. For time-harmonic problems, the improvement over continuous ABCs is achieved without any computational overhead, leading to the conclusion that the discrete ABCs should be used in lieu of continuous ABCs. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.