Application of Adapted-Bubbles to the Helmholtz Equation with Large Wavenumbers in 2D

Abstract

An adapted-bubbles approach which is a modification of the residual-free bubbles (RFB) method, is proposed for the Helmholtz problem in 2D. A new two-level finite element method is introduced for the approximations of the bubble functions. Unlike the other equations such as the advection-diffusion equation, RFB method when applied to the Helmholtz equation, does not depend on another stabilized method to obtain approximations to the solutions of the sub-problems. Adapted-bubbles (AB) are obtained by a simple modification of the sub-problems. This modification increases the accuracy of the numerical solution impressively. We provide numerical experiments with the AB method up to $ch = 5$ where $c$ is the wavenumber and $h$ is the mesh size. Numerical tests show that the AB method is better by far than higher order methods available in the literature.