A fast method for evaluating Volume potentials in the Galerkin boundary element method

Abstract

Three algorithm are proposed to evaluate volume potentials that arise in boundary element methods for elliptic PDEs. The approach is to apply a modified fast multipole method for a boundary concentrated volume mesh. If $h$ is the meshwidth of the boundary, then the volume is discretized using nearly $O(h^{-2})$ degrees of freedom, and the algorithm computes potentials in nearly $O(h^{-2})$ complexity. Here nearly means that logarithmic terms of $h$ may appear. Thus the complexity of volume potentials calculations is of the same asymptotic order as boundary potentials. For sources and potentials with sufficient regularity the parameters of the algorithm can be designed such that the error of the approximated potential converges at any specified rate $O(h^p)$. The accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms are demonstrated for potentials of the Poisson equation in three dimensions.