David Hewett | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

A discontinuous Galerkin method with fractal elements

We formulate, analyse, and implement a discontinuous Galerkin finite element method (DG-FEM) for the approximation of the solution of an elliptic boundary value problem in a domain with fractal boundary. We consider the case of the Poisson equation in the Koch snowflake domain with zero Dirichlet boundary conditions, but our methodology can be generalised to other cases. Rather than first approximating the snowflake domain by a polygonal "prefractal" and then applying a standard DG-FEM on the prefractal, we define a DG-FEM on the snowflake itself, using a geometry-conforming mesh (a fractal tiling) consisting of fractal elements, each similar to the original snowflake. Fluxes across inter-element boundaries, which are fractal curves, are represented in a weak way by integrals over element subdomains. We show how, for local polynomial basis functions, these integrals can be evaluated exactly using the similarity of the elements. We prove well-posedness and quasi-optimality of the method, and provide a partial convergence analysis. We present numerical results for piecewise linear and piecewise quadratic basis functions, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. We also apply our method to the related Dirichlet eigenvalue problem.

math.NA↗

arXiv2020

Fast hybrid numerical-asymptotic boundary element methods for high frequency screen and aperture problems based on least-squares collocation

We present a hybrid numerical-asymptotic (HNA) boundary element method (BEM) for high frequency scattering by two-dimensional screens and apertures, whose computational cost to achieve any prescribed accuracy remains bounded with increasing frequency. Our method is a collocation implementation of the high order hp HNA approximation space of Hewett et al. IMA J. Numer. Anal. 35 (2015), pp.1698- 1728, where a Galerkin implementation was studied. An advantage of the current collocation scheme is that the one-dimensional highly oscillatory singular integrals appearing in the BEM matrix entries are significantly easier to evaluate than the two-dimensional integrals appearing in the Galerkin case, which leads to much faster computation times. Here we compute the required integrals at frequency-independent cost using the numerical method of steepest descent, which involves complex contour deformation. The change from Galerkin to collocation is nontrivial because naive collocation implementations based on square linear systems suffer from severe numerical instabilities associated with the numerical redundancy of the HNA basis, which produces highly ill-conditioned BEM matrices. In this paper we show how these instabilities can be removed by oversampling, and solving the resulting overdetermined collocation system in a weighted least-squares sense using a truncated singular value decomposition. On the basis of our numerical experiments, the amount of oversampling required to stabilise the method is modest (around 25% typically suffices) and independent of frequency. As an application of our method we present numerical results for high frequency scattering by prefractal approximations to the middle-third Cantor set.

math.NA↗