High-Order Accurate Solutions to the Helmholtz Equation in the Presence of Boundary Singularities
Abstract
Problems of time-harmonic wave propagation arise in important fields of study such as geological surveying, radar detection/evasion, and aircraft design. These often involve high-frequency waves, which demand high-order methods to mitigate the dispersion error. We propose a high-order method for computing solutions to the variable-coefficient inhomogeneous Helmholtz equation in two dimensions on domains bounded by piecewise smooth curves of arbitrary shape with a finite number of boundary singularities at known locations. We utilize compact finite difference (FD) schemes on regular structured grids to achieve high order accuracy due to their efficiency and simplicity, as well as the capability to approximate variable-coefficient differential operators. In this work, a 4th-order compact FD scheme for the variable-coefficient Helmholtz equation on a Cartesian grid in 2D is derived and tested. The well known limitation of finite differences is that they lose accuracy when the boundary curve does not coincide with the discretization grid, which is a severe restriction on the geometry of the computational domain. Therefore, the algorithm presented in this work combines high-order FD schemes with the method of difference potentials (DP), which retains the efficiency of FD while allowing for boundary shapes that are not aligned with the grid without sacrificing the accuracy of the FD scheme.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 31, 2015
- Accession Number
- ADA623313
Entities
People
- Darrell S. Britt Jr.
Organizations
- North Carolina State University