In this paper, we recast the variational formulation corresponding to the single layer boundary integral operator V for the wave equation as a minimization problem in L2(Σ), where Σ:=∂Ω×(0,T) is the lateral boundary of the space-time domain Q:=Ω×(0,T). For discretization, the minimization problem is restated as a mixed saddle point formulation. Unique solvability is established by combining conforming nested boundary element spaces for the mixed formulation such that the related bilinear form is discrete inf-sup stable. We analyze under which conditions the discrete inf-sup stability is satisfied, and moreover, we show that the mixed formulation provides a simple error indicator, which can be used for adaptivity. We present several numerical experiments showing the applicability of the method to different time-domain boundary integral formulations used in the literature.

A preconditioner is proposed for Laplace exterior boundary value problems on multi-screens. To achieve this, the quotient-space boundary element method and operator preconditioning are combined. For a fairly general subclass of multi-screens, it is shown that this approach paves the way for block diagonal Calderón preconditioners which achieve a spectral condition number that grows only logarithmically with decreasing mesh size, just as in the case of simple screens. Since the resulting scheme contains many more degrees of freedom than strictly required, strategies are presented to remove almost all redundancy without significant loss of effectiveness of the preconditioner. The performance of this method is verified by providing representative numerical results. Further numerical experiments suggest that these results can be extended to a much wider class of multi-screens that cover essentially all geometries encountered in practice, leading to a significantly reduced simulation cost.

Unless special conditions apply, the attempt to solve ill-conditioned systems of linear equations with standard numerical methods leads to uncontrollably high numerical error and often slow convergence of an iterative solver. In many cases, such systems arise from the discretization of operator equations with a large number of discrete variables and the ill-conditioning is tackled by means of preconditioning. A key observation in this paper is the sometimes overlooked fact that while traditional preconditioning effectively accelerates convergence of iterative methods, it generally does not improve the accuracy of the solution. Nonetheless, it is sometimes possible to overcome this barrier: accuracy can be improved significantly if the equation is transformed before discretization, a process we refer to as full operator preconditioning (FOP). We highlight that this principle is already used in various areas, including second kind integral equations and Olver–Townsend’s spectral method. We formulate a sufficient condition under which high accuracy can be obtained by FOP. We illustrate this for a fourth order differential equation which is discretized using finite elements.

We present a new approach for boundary integral equations for the wave equation with zero initial conditions. Unlike previous attempts, our mathematical formulation allows us to prove that the associated boundary integral operators are continuous and satisfy inf-sup conditions in trace spaces of the same regularity, which are closely related to standard energy spaces with the expected regularity in space and time. This feature is crucial from a numerical perspective, as it provides the foundations to derive sharper error estimates and paves the way to devise efficient adaptive space-time boundary element methods, which will be tackled in future work. On the other hand, the proposed approach is compatible with the current time dependent boundary element method's implementations, and we predict that it explains many of the behaviors observed in practice but that were not understood with the existing theory.

We discuss the ellipticity of the single layer boundary integral operator for the wave equation in one space dimension. This result not only generalizes the well-known ellipticity of the energetic boundary integral formulation in L², but it also turns out to be a particular case of a recent result on the inf-sup stability of boundary integral operators for the wave equation. Instead of the time derivative in the energetic formulation, we use a modified Hilbert transformation, which allows us to stay in Sobolev spaces of the same order.

We propose an operator preconditioner for general elliptic pseudodifferential equations in a domain Ω, where Ω is either in Rⁿ or in a Riemannian manifold. For linear systems of equations arising from low-order Galerkin discretizations, we obtain condition numbers that are independent of the mesh size and of the choice of bases for test and trial functions. The basic ingredient is a classical formula by Boggio for the fractional Laplacian, which is extended analytically. In the special case of the weakly and hypersingular operators on a line segment or a screen, our approach gives a unified, independent proof for a series of recent results by Hiptmair, Jerez-Hanckes, Nédélec and Urzúa-Torres. We also study the increasing relevance of the regularity assumptions on the mesh with the order of the operator. Numerical examples validate our theoretical findings and illustrate the performance of the proposed preconditioner on quasi-uniform, graded and adaptively generated meshes.

A complex screen is an arrangement of panels that may not be even locally orientable because of junction lines. A comprehensive trace space framework for first-kind variational boundary integral equations on complex screens has been established in Claeys and Hiptmair (Integr Equ Oper Theory 77:167–197, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00020-013-2085-x) for the Helmholtz equation, and in Claeys and Hiptmair (Integr Equ Oper Theory 84:33–68, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00020-015-2242-5) for Maxwell’s equations in frequency domain. The gist is a quotient space perspective that allows to make sense of jumps of traces as factor spaces of multi-trace spaces modulo single-trace spaces without relying on orientation. This paves the way for formulating first-kind boundary integral equations in weak form posed on energy trace spaces. In this article we extend that idea to the Galerkin boundary element (BE) discretization of first-kind boundary integral equations. Instead of trying to approximate jumps directly, the new quotient space boundary element method employs a Galerkin BE approach in multi-trace boundary element spaces. This spawns discrete boundary integral equations with large null spaces comprised of single-trace functions. Yet, since the right-hand-sides of the linear systems of equations are consistent, Krylov subspace iterative solvers like GMRES are not affected by the presence of a kernel and still converge to a solution. This is strikingly confirmed by numerical tests.