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

Abstract 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 orderhpHNA approximation space of Hewett et al. (IMA J Numer Anal 35:1698–1728, 2015), 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.