A system of boundary integral equations for the transmission problem in acoustics

In this paper, we reduce the classical two-dimensional transmission problem in acoustic scattering to a system of coupled boundary integral equations (BIEs), and consider the weak formulation of the resulting equations. Uniqueness and existence results for the weak solution of corresponding variational equations are established. In contrast to the coupled system in Costabel and Stephan (1985) [4], we need to take into account exceptional frequencies to obtain the unique solvability. Boundary element methods (BEM) based on both the standard and a two-level fast multipole Galerkin schemes are employed to compute the solution of the variational equation. Numerical results are presented to verify the efficiency and accuracy of the numerical methods.