Acoustic scattering from locally perturbed periodic surfaces

Abstract

We prove well-posedness for the time-harmonic acoustic scattering of plane waves from locally perturbed periodic surfaces in two dimensions under homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. This covers sound-soft acoustic as well as perfectly conducting, TE polarized electromagnetic boundary value problems. Our arguments are based on a variational method in a truncated bounded domain coupled with a boundary integral representation. If the quasi-periodic Green's function to the unperturbed periodic scattering problem is calculated efficiently, then the variational approach can be used for a numerical scheme based on coupling finite elements with a boundary element algorithm. Even for a general 2D rough-surface problem, it turns out that the Green's function defined with the radiation condition ASR satisfies the Sommerfeld radiation condition over the half plane. Based on this result, for a local perturbation of a periodic surface, the scattered wave of an incoming plane wave is the sum of the scattered wave for the unperturbed periodic surface plus an additional scattered wave satisfying Sommerfeld's condition on the half plane. Whereas the scattered wave for the unperturbed periodic surface has a far field consisting of a finite number of propagating plane waves, the additional field contributes to the far field by a far-field pattern defined in the half-plane directions similarly to the pattern known for bounded obstacles.