Some applications of a galerkin‐collocation method for boundary integral equations of the first kind

Abstract

Abstract Here we apply the boundary integral method to several plane interior and exterior boundary value problems from conformal mapping, elasticity and fluid dynamics. These are reduced to equivalent boundary integral equations on the boundary curve which are Fredholm integral equations of the first kind having kernels with logarithmic singularities and defining strongly elliptic pseudodifferential operators of order ‐ 1 which provide certain coercivity properties. The boundary integral equations are approximated by Galerkin's method using B ‐splines on the boundary curve in connection with an appropriate numerical quadrature, which yields a modified collocation scheme. We present a complete asymptotic error analysis for the fully discretized numerical equations which is based on superapproximation results for Galerkin's method, on consistency estimates and stability properties in connection with the illposedness of the first kind equations in L 2 . We also present computational results of several numerical experiments revealing accuracy, efficiency and an amazing asymptotical agreement of the numerical with the theoretical errors. The method is used for computations of conformal mappings, exterior Stokes flows and slow viscous flows past elliptic obstacles.