Galerkin Formulations of the Method of Fundamental Solutions

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce two Galerkin formulations of the Method of Fundamental Solutions (MFS). In contrast to the collocation formulation of the MFS, the proposed Galerkin formulations involve the evaluation of integrals over the boundary of the domain under consideration. On the other hand, these formulations lead to some desirable properties of the stiffness matrix such as symmetry in certain cases. Several numerical examples are considered by these methods and their various features compared.