Improving the Accuracy of the Second-Kind Fredholm Integral Equations by Using the Buffa-Christiansen Functions

In computational electromagnetics, the second-kind Fredholm integral equations are known to have very fast iterative convergence but rather poor solution accuracy compared with the first-kind Fredholm integral equations. The error source of the second-kind integral equations can mainly be attributed to the discretization error of the identity operators. In this paper, a scheme is presented to significantly suppress such discretization error by using the Buffa-Christiansen functions as the testing function, leading to much more accurate solutions of the second-kind integral equations, while maintaining their fast convergence properties. Numerical experiments are designed to investigate and demonstrate the accuracy improvement of the second-kind surface integral equations in both perfect electric conductor and dielectric cases by using the presented discretization scheme.