Rapidly Convergent Eigenfunction Expansions of Green Functions for a Perfectly Conducting Wedge

Abstract

Existing Green functions for a conducting wedge in the form of infinite series of orthogonal eigenfunctions are known to suffer from slow and conditional convergence 1) near the source point, due to the singularity of the Green functions at source points, and 2) when the source point is near the surface of the wedge, due to the presence of a nearby image source. As a result, such expansions are unsuited for the exact solution of singular integral equations wherein values of the Green functions at the source point do appear inside the integral. In this paper, alternative expansions are proposed which converge rapidly for any combination of the source and observation points. The main idea is to extract in closed form both the singular term and the nearby image term together with certain simple asymptotic terms. This helps isolate the inherent singularities and, thus, transform the remaining part of the Green function into a rapidly converging series of elementary terms. Numerical examples and case studies illustrate the stability and high accuracy of the new expansions. Application to the solution of an integral equation associated with wave diffraction by perfectly conducting curved strips in the vicinity of a wedge is exemplified.