The uncoupling of boundary integral and finite element methods for nonlinear boundary value problems (Q1842066)

The uncoupling of boundary integral and finite element methods is applied to study the weak solvability of certain nonlinear exterior boundary value problems. The uncoupling procedure is based on choosing the artificial coupling boundary condition as a circle (or a sphere). This allows the exact inversion of the boundary integral operators which appear in the coupling equations and leads to a weak formulation which includes only one boundary term which is the weakly singular operator determined by the single layer potential. The result is to reduce by more than half the work of coding and computation compared with the Galerkin equations of the usual coupling method. As a model the authors consider a nonlinear second order-elliptic equation in divergence form defined in a bounded region of the plane, which becomes Laplace's equation in the corresponding unbounded exterior region. Sufficient conditions are imposed on the nonlinear coefficients in order to establish existence, uniqueness, and approximation results. The authors analyse nonlinear equations which lead to both monotone and non-monotone operators.