On boundary conditions for unbounded flows

Abstract

Abstract We examine a method to impose boundary conditions on arbitrary boundaries, introduced to make domains of infinite extent finite for the purpose of numerical calculations, when a finite element discretization based on linear, bilinear or trilinear elements is used, in one, two or three dimensions, respectively. In particular, we look at the so‐called ‘free’ boundary condition, which consists in retaining the boundary integrals generated by the weighted‐residuals formulation along the open boundaries and adding them to the stiffness matrix. We show that this procedure is exactly equivalent to imposing on the boundary nodes a Sommerfeld radiation condition in one dimension, and a slightly modified form of the Sommerfeld boundary condition in two and three dimensions. We also show that the procedure is not applicable to the purely elliptic case.