Numerical investigation of the conditioning for plane wave discontinuous Galerkin methods
For researchers using plane wave DG methods for Helmholtz problems, this study provides empirical insights into conditioning and a practical improvement via orthogonalization.
The paper investigates the conditioning of plane wave discontinuous Galerkin methods for the Helmholtz problem, showing that the condition number depends algebraically on mesh size and wave number, and exponentially on the number of plane wave directions. Orthogonalization of local basis functions significantly reduces GMRES iterations.
We present a numerical study to investigate the conditioning of the plane wave discontinuous Galerkin discretization of the Helmholtz problem. We provide empirical evidence that the spectral condition number of the plane wave basis on a single element depends algebraically on the mesh size and the wave number, and exponentially on the number of plane wave directions; we also test its dependence on the element shape. We show that the conditioning of the global system can be improved by orthogonalization of the local basis functions with the modified Gram-Schmidt algorithm, which results in significantly fewer GMRES iterations for solving the discrete problem iteratively.