The Wave-Matching Boundary Integral Equation — An energy approach to Galerkin BEM for acoustic wave propagation problems

In this paper, a new Boundary Integral Equation (BIE) is proposed for solution of the scalar Helmholtz equation. Applications include acoustic scattering problems, as occur in room acoustics and outdoor and underwater sound propagation. It draws together ideas from the study of time-harmonics and transient BIEs and spatial audio sensing and rendering, to produce an energy-inspired Galerkin BEM that is intended for use with oscillatory basis functions. Pivotal is the idea that waves at a boundary may be decomposed into incoming and outgoing components. When written in its admittance form, it can be thought of setting the Burton-Miller coupling parameter differently for each basis function based on its oscillation; this is a discrete form of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map. It is also naturally expressed in a reflectance form, which can be solved by matrix inversion or by marching on in reflection order. Consideration of this leads to an orthogonality relation between the incoming and outgoing waves, which makes the scheme immune to interior cavity eigenmodes. Moreover, the scheme is seen to have two remarkable properties when solution is performed over an entire obstacle: i) it has a condition number of 1 for all positive-real wavenumber k on any closed geometry when a specific choice of cylindrical basis functions are used; ii) when modelling two domains separated by a barrier domain, the two problems are numerical uncoupled when plane wave basis functions are used - this is the case in reality but is not achieved by any other BIE representation that the authors are aware of. Normalisation and envelope functions, as would be required to build a Partition-of-Unity or Hybrid-Numerical-Asymptotic scheme, are introduced and the above properties are seen to become approximate. The modified scheme is applied successfully to a cylinder test case: accuracy of the solution is maintained and the BIE is still immune to interior cavity eigenmodes, gives similar conditioning to the Burton-Miller method and iterative solution is stable. It is seen that for this test case the majority of values in the interaction matrices are extremely small and may be set to zero without affecting conditioning or accuracy, thus the linear system become sparse - a property uncommon in BEM formulations.