On efficient preconditioners for iterative solution of a Galerkin boundary element equation for the three-dimensional exterior Helmholtz problem

The paper presents a Galerkin numerical method for solving the hyper-singular boundary integral equations for the exterior Helmholtz problem in three dimensions with a Neumann's boundary condition. Previous work in the topic has often dealt with the collocation method with a piecewise constant approximation because high order collocation and Galerkin methods are not available due to the presence of a hypersingular integral operator. This paper proposes a high order Galerkin method by using singularity subtraction technique to reduce the hyper-singular operator to a weakly singular one. Moreover, we show here how to extend the previous work (J. Appl. Numer. Math. 36 (4) (2001) 475-489) on sparse preconditioners to the Galerkin case leading to fast convergence of two iterative solvers: the conjugate gradient normal method and the generalised minimal residual method. A comparison with the collocation method is also presented for the Helmholtz problem with several wavenumbers. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.