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This article deals with the use of the Ultra Weak Variational Formulation to solve Helmholtz equation and time harmonic Maxwell equations.

The method, issued from domain decomposition techniques, lies in partitioning the domain into subdomains with the use of adapted interface conditions. Going further than in domain decomposition, we make so that the problem degenerates into an interface problem only.

The new formulation is equivalent to the weak formulation. The discretization process is a Galerkin one. A possible advantage of the UWVF applied to wave equations is that we use the physical approach that consists in approximating the solution with plane waves. The formulation allows to use a very large mesh as compared to the frequency, on the contrary to the Finite Element Method when applied to time harmonic equations. Furthermore, the convergence analysis shows the method is a high order one: the order evolves as the square root of the number of degrees of freedom.

Discrete methods of numerical analysis have been used successfully for decades for the solution of problems involving wave diffraction, etc. However, these methods, including the finite element and boundary element methods, can require a prohibitively large number of elements as the wavelength becomes progressively shorter. In this work, a new type of interpolation for the acoustic field is described in which the usual conventional shape functions are modified by the inclusion of a set of plane waves propagating in multiple directions. Including such a plane wave basis in a boundary element formulation has been found in the current work to be highly successful. Results are shown for a variety of classical scattering problems, and also for scattering from nonconvex obstacles. Notable results include a conclusion that, using this new formulation, only approximately 2.5 degrees of freedom per wavelength are required. Compared with the 8 to 10 degrees of freedom normally required for conventional boundary (and finite) elements, this shows the marked improvement in storage requirement. Moreover, the new formulation is shown to be extremely accurate. It is estimated that for 2D Helmholtz problems, and for a given computational resource, the frequency range allowed by this method is extended by a factor of three over conventional direct collocation Boundary Element Method. Recent successful developments of the current method for plane elastodynamics problems are also briefly outlined.

A multidomain pseudospectral time-domain (PSTD) method is developed for acoustic wave equations in lossy media. The method is based on the spectral derivative operator approximated by Chebyshev Lagrange polynomials. In this multidomain scheme, the computational domain is decomposed into a set of subdomains conformal to the problem geometry. Each curved subdomain is then mapped onto a cube in the curvilinear coordinates so that a tensor-product Chebyshev grid can be utilized without the staircasing error. An unsplit-field, well-posed PML is developed as the absorbing boundary condition. The algorithm is validated by analytical solutions. The numerical solutions show that this algorithm is efficient for simulating acoustic wave phenomena in the presence of complex objects in inhomogeneous media. To our knowledge, the multidomain PSTD method for acoustics is a new development in three dimensions, although in two dimensions the method can be made equivalent to the two-dimensional method in electromagnetics.