Wideband fast multipole boundary element method: Application to acoustic scattering from aerodynamic bodies

A wideband adaptive multi‐level fast multipole method (MLFMM) is used to accelerate the matrix–vector products arising from a boundary element method (BEM) formulation which solves the Burton–Miller boundary integral equation (BIE). The wideband MLFMM presented here applies a plane wave expansion formulation with fast interpolation and filtering for calculations in the high‐frequency regime and a partial wave expansion formulation with rotation‐coaxial translation in the low‐frequency regime. The iterative solvers GMRES, Bi‐CGSTAB and CGS are tested and compared and a block diagonal preconditioner is used to improve the condition number of the BEM matrices and to accelerate the convergence of the iterative solvers. Details on the implementation of the formulations are described, including the treatment of singular integrals. Results for acoustic scattering from a wing plus engine nacelle configuration for a prescribed source in a subsonic uniform flow are presented for a broad range of frequencies in order to assess the implemented capability. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.