Improved extrapolation technique in the boundary element method to find the capacitances of the unit square and cube (Q1360385)

The accuracy of a result in the boundary element method depends on the total number \(N\) of boundary segments that are used. It should be desirable to extrapolate the effective value of \(N\) to infinity, but there is too little theoretical knowledge to do this. The present paper describes an efficient empirical technique for extrapolating of \(N\) to infinity. The study of certain problems in electrostatics (calculating capacitances) with a known exact solution (flat circular disc of zero thickness) or with a known highly accurate approximate solution (unit square or cube) [see \textit{E. Goto, Y. Shi} and \textit{N. Yoshida}, J. Comput. Phys. 100, 105-115 (1992)] yields that the discretization error may be expressed as a polynomial in \(1/N\). Programs using this extrapolation are available by WWW. -- However, more than a century ago, the foundator of the theory, J. C. Maxwell, obtained for the unit square a value with an error of only \(0.8\%\) compared with the recent results!