English

Adaptive space-time BEM for the heat equation with Neumann boundary conditions

Numerical Analysis 2026-07-15 v1

Abstract

We consider the space-time boundary element method (BEM) for the heat equation with prescribed initial and Neumann data. We propose a weighted-residual a posteriori error estimator that is an upper bound for the unknown BEM error. The possibly locally refined meshes are assumed to be parabolically scaled prismatic, i.e., their elements are tensor-products J×KJ\times K of elements in time JJ and space KK with Jdiam(K)2|J| \eqsim \text{diam}(K)^2. In the considered numerical experiments on two-dimensional domains in space, an adaptive algorithm steered by the derived estimator yields significantly faster convergence compared to uniform refinement, achieving near-optimal rates even in the presence of strong singularities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.13578,
  title  = {Adaptive space-time BEM for the heat equation with Neumann boundary conditions},
  author = {Gregor Gantner and Helmut Harbrecht and Franz Nowakowsky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.13578},
  year   = {2026}
}