Nonreflecting boundary conditions for time-dependent wave propagation

Abstract

Many problems in computational science arise in unbounded domains and thus require an artificial boundary B, which truncates the unbounded exterior domain and restricts the region of interest to a finite computational domain, . It then becomes necessary to impose a boundary condition at B, which ensures that the solution in coincides with the restriction to of the solution in the unbounded region. If we exhibit a boundary condition, such that the fictitious boundary appears perfectly transparent, we shall call it exact. Otherwise it will correspond to an approximate boundary condition and generate some spurious reflection, which travels back and spoils the solution everywhere in the computational domain. In addition to the transparency property, we require the computational effort involved with such a boundary condition to be comparable to that of the numerical method used in the interior. Otherwise the boundary condition will quickly be dismissed as prohibitively expensive and impractical. The constant demand for increasingly accurate, efficient, and robust numerical methods, which can handle a wide variety of physical phenomena, spurs the search for improvements in artificial boundary conditions. In the last decade, the perfectly matched layer (PML) approach [16] has proved a flexible and accurate method for the simulation of waves in unbounded media. Standard PML formulations, however, usually require wave equations stated in their standard second-order form to be reformulated as first-order systems, thereby introducing many additional unknowns. To circumvent this cumbersome and somewhat expensive step we propose instead a simple PML formulation directly for the wave equation in its second-order form. Our formulation requires fewer auxiliary unknowns than previous formulations [23, 94]. Starting from a high-order local nonreflecting boundary condition (NRBC) for single scattering [55], we derive a local NRBC for time-dependent multiple scattering problems, which is completely local both in space and time. To do so, we first develop a high order exterior evaluation formula for a purely outgoing wave field, given its values and those of certain auxiliary functions needed for the local NRBC on the artificial boundary. By combining that evaluation formula with the decomposition of the total scattered field into purely outgoing contributions, we obtain the first exact, completely local, NRBC for time-dependent multiple scattering. Remarkably, the information transfer (of time retarded values) between sub-domains will only occur across those parts of the artificial boundary, where outgoing rays intersect neighboring sub-domains, i.e. typically only across a fraction of the artificial boundary. The accuracy, stability and efficiency of this new local NRBC is evaluated by coupling it to standard finite element or finite difference methods.