We analyze a new approach to three-dimensional electromagnetic scattering problems via fast isogeometric boundary element methods. Starting with an investigation of the theoretical setting around the electric field integral equation within the isogeometric framework, we show existence, uniqueness, and quasi-optimality of the isogeometric approach. For a fast and efficient computation, we then introduce and analyze an interpolation-based fast multipole method tailored to the isogeometric setting, which admits competitive algorithmic and complexity properties. This is followed by a series of numerical examples of industrial scope, together with a detailed presentation and interpretation of the results.

We present an indirect higher order boundary element method utilising NURBS mappings for exact geometry representation and an interpolation-based fast multipole method for compression and reduction of computational complexity, to counteract the problems arising due to the dense matrices produced by boundary element methods. By solving Laplace and Helmholtz problems via a single layer approach we show, through a series of numerical examples suitable for easy comparison with other numerical schemes, that one can indeed achieve extremely high rates of convergence of the pointwise potential through the utilisation of higher order B-spline-based ansatz functions.

We define a conforming B-spline discretisation of the de Rham complex on multipatch geometries. We introduce and analyse the properties of interpolation operators onto these spaces which commute w.r.t. the surface differential operators. Using these results as a basis, we derive new convergence results of optimal order w.r.t. the respective energy spaces and provide approximation properties of the spline discretisations of trace spaces for application in the theory of isogeometric boundary element methods. Our analysis allows for a straight forward generalisation to finite element methods.

SUMMARYIn this article, a black-box higher order fast multipole method for solving boundary integral equations on parametric surfaces in three spatial dimensions is proposed. Such piecewise smooth surfaces are the topic of recent studies in isogeometric analysis. Due to the exact surface representation, the rate of convergence of higher order methods is not limited by approximation errors of the surface. An element-wise clustering strategy yields a balanced cluster tree and an efficient numerical integration scheme for the underlying Galerkin method. By performing the interpolation for the fast multipole method directly on the reference domain, the cost complexity in the polynomial degree is reduced by one order. This gain is independent of the application of either H-or H 2 -matrices. In fact, several simplifications in the construction of H 2 -matrices are pointed out, which are a by-product of the surface representation. Extensive numerical examples are provided in order to quantify and qualify the proposed method.

In this article, we present Bembel, the C++ library featuring higher order isogeometric Galerkin boundary element methods for Laplace, Helmholtz, and Maxwell problems. Bembel is compatible with geometries from the Octave NURBS package, and provides an interface to the Eigen template library for linear algebra operations. For computational efficiency, it applies an embedded fast multipole method tailored to the isogeometric analysis framework and a parallel matrix assembly based on OpenMP.