On a time-discrete convolution—space collocation BEM for the numerical solution of two-dimensional wave propagation problems in unbounded domains

Abstract

Abstract For the numerical solution of a classical two-dimensional Dirichlet exterior problem for the wave equation in the time domain, we consider a space-time boundary integral equation approach, based on its discretization by means of the coupling of a time discrete convolution quadrature of order 2, with the classical continuous piecewise linear boundary element method. The latter is either the Galerkin method or the collocation one, this being computationally much cheaper. For the efficient evaluation of most of the integrals generated by these two boundary element methods, but also for the subsequent analysis, we first define a new Gaussian quadrature. After recalling that stability and convergence have been proved for the Galerkin method, while for the collocation one we only have numerical evidences of these properties, to (partially) fill this gap, we first note that collocation can be obtained directly from the Galerkin system, after discretizing its inner product integral by using the composite trapezoidal rule, which in this case turns out to be the Gaussian rule mentioned above with $1$ node. Then, we show that for all (positive) time step-sizes $\varDelta _t$, when we let $h\rightarrow 0$, independently from $\varDelta _t$, the matrix of the linear system produced by the collocation method, properly normalized, converges, in the $\infty $-norm, to the corresponding Galerkin matrix. The behavior of the associated absolute and relative errors in the $\infty $-norm, as $h\rightarrow 0$, are $O\big (h^{\frac {5}{3}}+\varDelta _t^{-(1+\varepsilon )}h^{\frac {5+\varepsilon }{2}}[|\!\ln \varDelta _t|+|\!\ln h|]\big )$ and $O\big (h^{\frac {2}{3}}/|\!\ln \varDelta _t|+\varDelta _t^{-(1+\varepsilon )}h^{\frac {3+\varepsilon }{2}}[1+|\!\ln h|/|\!\ln \varDelta _t|]\big )$, respectively, with $\varepsilon>0$ as close as one likes to $0$ and the $O(\cdot )$ constant independent from $\varDelta _t, h$. Some possible extensions of the investigation we carried out are also mentioned.