Coupling of Dirichlet-to-Neumann boundary condition and finite difference methods in curvilinear coordinates for multiple scattering (Q983010)

The authors develop a numerical technique for solving the acoustic scattering problem of several geometrically separated obstacles. It is assumed that each obstacle can be inscribed in a sphere whose origin lies inside the obstacle. The scattered field can then be uniquely decomposed into a sum of fields \(u_m\), where each field \(u_m\) is a purely outgoing field from obstacle \(m\) (\(u_m\) satisfies the Helmholtz equation everywhere except on that obstacle and also fulfills the Sommerfeldt radiation condition). On each sphere, a Dirichlet-to-Neumann condition is computed for the fields using a finite difference method combined with a generalization of polar coordinates, called elliptic-polar grids, which both are presented in detail in this paper. The Dirichlet-to-Neumann conditions are then used to solve the fully coupled acoustic scattering problem. It is numerically verified that for a second order finite difference scheme, the convergence rate of the numerical solution is second order, too.