Symmetric coupling of LDG-FEM and DG-BEM (Q2631054)

The authors study in detail the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method (FEM) and boundary element method (BEM) for a three-dimensional second-order elliptic transmission problem. They propose the first FEM-BEM coupling scheme that combines discontinuous Galerkin methods on the boundary and in the interior. The symmetric variational formulation discretized by nonconforming Raviart-Thomas elements on a general partition of the interior domain is coupled with discontinuous boundary elements on a mesh of the transmission interface which is related to the interior partition by a mild local condition. The authors prove stability and a priori error estimates for the discontinuous FEM-BEM scheme under the condition of conforming and quasi-uniform meshes on the boundary. The same technique allows to consider the case when continuous rather than discontinuous boundary elements are used. Here the convergence result can be proved without the quasi-uniformity requirement of the meshes on the coupling boundary. The theory is confirmed by numerical experiments in two-dimensions.