A weakly singular form of the hypersingular boundary integral equation applied to 3-D acoustic wave problems (Q1198758)

A general form of the hypersingular boundary integral equation (BIE) is developed for three-dimensional acoustic wave problems, which contains at most weakly singular integrals and is valid for radiation and scattering problems with arbitrary geometries. This weakly singular form can be derived by employing certain integral identities involving the static Green's function. In this paper it is also shown a straightforward procedure for the discretization of this weakly singular form of the hypersingular BIE. It is seen that the same collocation procedures and regular quadrature as used for conventional BIE are sufficient to compute the integrals involved, with only slightly longer computing times, which is an advantage of this method as compared to other methods (e.g. the Galerkin approach) which require much longer times. The requirements imposed on the density function for existence of the hypersingular BIE are discussed, with special emphasis on the possibility of relaxing some of the previous smoothness requirements. Three kinds of boundary elements, with different smoothness features, are employed and numerical results are given for scattering from a rigid sphere at fictitious frequencies for wavenumbers from \(\pi\) to \(5\pi\). With the methodology in this paper, the fictitious eigenfrequency difficulty, long associated with BIE for exterior problems, should no longer be a troublesome issue, as the authors conclude.