A Singularity-free Boundary Equation Method for Wave Scattering

Traditional boundary integral methods suffer from the singularity of Green's kernels. The paper develops, for a model problem of 2D scattering as an illustrative example, singularity-free boundary difference equations. Instead of converting Maxwell's system into an integral boundary form first and discretizing second, here the differential equations are first discretized on a regular grid and then converted to boundary difference equations. The procedure involves nonsingular Green's functions on a lattice rather than their singular continuous counterparts. Numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness, accuracy and convergence of the method. It can be generalized to 3D problems and to other classes of linear problems, including acoustics and elasticity.