A Nystrom method for weakly singular integral operators on surfaces

We describe a modified Nystrom method for the discretization of the weakly singular boundary integral operators which arise from the formulation of linear elliptic boundary value problems as integral equations. Standard Nystrom and collocation schemes proceed by representing functions via their values at a collection of quadrature nodes. Our method uses appropriately scaled function values in lieu of such representations. This results in a scheme which is mathematically equivalent to Galerkin discretization in that the resulting matrices are related to those obtained by Galerkin methods via conjugation with well-conditioned matrices, but which avoids the evaluation of double integrals. Moreover, we incorporate a new mechanism for approximating the singular integrals which arise from the discretization of weakly singular integral operators which is considerably more efficient than standard methods. We illustrate the performance of our method with numerical experiments. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.