HILBERT — a MATLAB implementation of adaptive 2D-BEM

Abstract

We report on the MATLAB program package HILBERT. It provides an easily-accessible implementation of lowest-order adaptive Galerkin boundary ele- ment methods for the numerical solution of the Poisson equation in 2D. The library was designed to serve several purposes: The stable implementation of the integral operators may be used in research code. The framework of MATLAB ensures usabil- ity in lectures on boundary element methods or scientific computing. Finally, we emphasize the use of adaptivity as general concept and for boundary element meth- ods in particular. In this work, we summarize recent analytical results on adaptivity in the context of BEM and illustrate the use of HILBERT. Various benchmarks are performed to empirically analyze the performance of the proposed adaptive algo- rithms and to compare adaptive and uniform mesh-refinements. In particular, we do not only focus on mathematical convergence behavior but also on the usage of crit- ical system resources such as memory consumption and computational time. In any case, the superiority of the proposed adaptive approach is empirically supported.