Stability of Galerkin and collocation time domain boundary element methodsas applied to the scalar equation wave

The Galerkin method for time domain boundary element analysis is presented in this paper and used for the first time as an alternative procedure to im prove the stability of BEM formulations applied to the scalar wave equation . The paper includes a short review of the classical time-stepping BEM form ulation and the modifications required to implement a Galerkin approach. No mathematical proof is given here, concerning the stability improvement of the Galerkin formulation over the point collocation method. However, strong numerical evidence of such stability improvement is provided by the second example of this paper where the Galerkin approach has shown to be stable f or rather small time steps. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.