A principle of images for absorbing boundary conditions

When one uses high‐order finite difference schemes for the wave equation, for instance fourth order schemes, the treatment of boundary conditions poses a real difficulty since one needs several additional equations (for the nodes close to the boundary), while one single scalar boundary condition is available. In the case of perfectly reflecting boundary conditions, namely the homogeneous Neumann or Dirichlet conditions, this difficulty can be overcomed by the use of the well‐known image principle, which permits the extension of the equation outside of the domain of calculation by an appropriate symmetrization of the data. We propose in this article a generalization of this principle to the absorbing boundary conditions. Through a symmetrization process, we are led to introduce a damped wave equation with a damping term supported by the boundary. The treatment of the boundary condition is then replaced by the approximation of this new damped wave equation in the whole space. The theoretical justification of our approach is based on new energy estimates for the wave equation (when high‐order absorbing boundary conditions are used), and constitutes an alternative to the use of the well‐known Kreiss criterion to prove the stability of the associated initial boundary value problems. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.