Biorthogonal wavelet approximation for the coupling of FEM-BEM (Q1849406)

The authors apply multiscale methods to the coupling of finite element and boundary element methods (FEM-BEM) to solve an exterior Dirichlet boundary value problem for the two-dimensional Poisson equation. By adapting biorthogonal wavelet matrix compression to the boundary terms with \(N\) degrees of freedom, it is shown that the resulting compression strategy fits the optimal convergence rate of the coupling Galerkin methods, while the number of nonzero entries in the corresponding stiffness matrices is considerably smaller than \(N^2\). Roughly speaking, using fast methods for the boundary integral operators, the overall complexity is determined by the complexity of the finite element part, as opposed to traditional methods where the boundary element part dominates the complexity. In the present situation, the minimization of the number of vanishing moments of the associated wavelet bases is important. A new feature of the present paper is an alternative formulation of the Galerkin scheme based on a modified inner product.