Frequency extraction for BEM-matrices arising from the 3D scalar Helmholtz equation

Abstract: The discretisation of boundary integral equations for the scalar Helmholtz equation leads to large dense linear systems. Efficient boundary element methods (BEM), such as the fast multipole method (FMM) and $\Hmat$ based methods, focus on structured low-rank approximations of subblocks in these systems. It is known that the ranks of these subblocks increase linearly with the wavenumber. We explore a data-sparse representation of BEM-matrices valid for a range of frequencies, based on extracting the known phase of the Green's function. Algebraically, this leads to a Hadamard product of a frequency matrix with an $\Hmat$. We show that the frequency dependency of this $\Hmat$ can be determined using a small number of frequency samples, even for geometrically complex three-dimensional scattering obstacles. We describe an efficient construction of the representation by combining adaptive cross approximation with adaptive rational approximation in the continuous frequency dimension. We show that our data-sparse representation allows to efficiently sample the full BEM-matrix at any given frequency, and as such it may be useful as part of an efficient sweeping routine.