A fast directional boundary element method for high frequency acoustic problems in three dimensions

Abstract: A highly efficient fast boundary element method (BEM) for solving large-scale engineering acoustic problems in a broad frequency range is developed and implemented. The acoustic problems are modeled by the Burton-Miller boundary integral equation (BIE), thus the fictitious frequency issue is completely avoided. The BIE is discretized by using the collocation method with piecewise constant elements. The linear systems are solved iteratively and accelerated by using a newly developed kernel-independent wideband fast directional algorithm (FDA) for fast summation of oscillatory kernels. In addition, the computational efficiency of the FDA is further promoted by exploiting the low-rank features of the translation matrices. The high accuracy and nearly linear computational complexity of the present method are clearly demonstrated by typical examples. An acoustic scattering problem with dimensionless wave number $kD$ (where $k$ is the wave number and $D$ is the typical length of the obstacle) up to 1000 and the degrees of freedom up to 4 million is successfully solved within 4 hours on a computer with one core and the memory usage is 24.7 GB.