Analysis of the Fourier series Dirichlet-to-Neumann boundary condition of the Helmholtz equation and its application to finite element methods

Abstract

It is well known that the Fourier series Dirichlet-to-Neumann (DtN) boundary condition can be used to solve the Helmholtz equation in unbounded domains. In this work, applying such DtN boundary condition and using the finite element method, we analyze and solve a two dimensional transmission problem describing elastic waves inside a bounded and closed elastic obstacle and acoustic waves outside it. We are mainly interested in analyzing the DtN boundary condition of the Helmholtz equation in order to establish the well-posedness results of the approximated variational equation, and further derive a priori error estimates involving effects of both the finite element discretization and the truncation of DtN map. Finally, some numerical results are presented to illustrate the accuracy of the numerical scheme.