An improved continued‐fraction‐based high‐order transmitting boundary for time‐domain analyses in unbounded domains

A high‐order local transmitting boundary to model the propagation of acoustic or elastic, scalar or vector‐valued waves in unbounded domains of arbitrary geometry is proposed. It is based on an improved continued‐fraction solution of the dynamic stiffness matrix of an unbounded medium. The coefficient matrices of the continued‐fraction expansion are determined recursively from the scaled boundary finite element equation in dynamic stiffness. They are normalised using a matrix‐valued scaling factor, which is chosen such that the robustness of the numerical procedure is improved. The resulting continued‐fraction solution is suitable for systems with many DOFs. It converges over the whole frequency range with increasing order of expansion and leads to numerically more robust formulations in the frequency domain and time domain for arbitrarily high orders of approximation and large‐scale systems. Introducing auxiliary variables, the continued‐fraction solution is expressed as a system of linear equations in iω in the frequency domain. In the time domain, this corresponds to an equation of motion with symmetric, banded and frequency‐independent coefficient matrices. It can be coupled seamlessly with finite elements. Standard procedures in structural dynamics are directly applicable in the frequency and time domains. Analytical and numerical examples demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method to an existing approach and its suitability for time‐domain simulations of large‐scale systems. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.