Spurious resonances for substructured FEM-BEM coupling

Abstract

We are interested in time-harmonic acoustic scattering by an impenetrable obstacle in a medium where the wavenumber is constant in an exterior unbounded subdomain and is possibly heterogeneous in a bounded subdomain. The associated Helmholtz boundary value problem can be solved by coupling the Finite Element Method (FEM) in the heterogeneous subdomain with the Boundary Element Method (BEM) in the homogeneous subdomain. Recently, we designed and analyzed a new substructured FEM-BEM formulation, called Generalized Optimized Schwarz Method (GOSM). Unfortunately, it is well known that, even when the initial boundary value problem is well-posed, the variational formulation of classical FEM-BEM couplings can be ill-posed for certain wavenumbers, called spurious resonances. In this paper, we focus on the Johnson-N\'ed\'elec and Costabel couplings and show that the GOSM derived from both is not immune to that issue. In particular, we give an explicit expression of the kernel of the local operator associated with the interface between the FEM and BEM subdomains. That kernel and the one of classical FEM-BEM couplings are simultaneously non-trivial.