Fast Ewald summation for Green\u2019s functions of Stokes flow in a half-space

Abstract

Recently, Gimbutas et al. (J Fluid Mech, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2015.302) derived an elegant representation for the Green’s functions of Stokes flow in a half-space. We present a fast summation method for sums involving these half-space Green’s functions (stokeslets, stresslets and rotlets) that consolidates and builds on the work by Klinteberg et al. (Res Math Sci 4(1):1, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40687-016-0092-7) for the corresponding free-space Green’s functions. The fast method is based on two main ingredients: The Ewald decomposition and subsequent use of FFTs. The Ewald decomposition recasts the sum into a sum of two exponentially decaying series: one in real space (short-range interactions) and one in Fourier space (long-range interactions) with the convergence of each series controlled by a common parameter. The evaluation of short-range interactions is accelerated by restricting computations to neighbours within a specified distance, while the use of FFTs accelerates the computations in Fourier space thus accelerating the overall sum. We demonstrate that while the method incurs extra costs for the half-space in comparison with the free-space evaluation, greater computational savings is also achieved when compared to their respective direct sums.