Numerical investigations of stabilized finite element computations for acoustics

Least-squares stabilization stands out among the numerous approaches that have been proposed for relaxing resolution requirements of Galerkin computations for acoustics, by combining substantial improvement in performance with extremely simple implementation. The Galerkin/least-squares and Galerkin-gradient/least-squares methods are quite similar for structured meshes of linear finite elements. A series of numerical tests compares the two methods for several configurations with different kinds of boundary conditions employing structured and unstructured meshes. Various definitions of the resolution-dependent stability parameters are considered, along with different definitions of the mesh size upon which they depend.