Fast multipole method for the biharmonic equation in three dimensions

The evaluation of sums (matrix–vector products) of the solutions of the three-dimensional biharmonic equation can be accelerated using the fast multipole method, while memory requirements can also be significantly reduced. We develop a complete translation theory for these equations. It is shown that translations of elementary solutions of the biharmonic equation can be achieved by considering the translation of a pair of elementary solutions of the Laplace equations. The extension of the theory to the case of polyharmonic equations in R 3 is also discussed. An efficient way of performing the FMM for biharmonic equations using the solution of a complex valued FMM for the Laplace equation is presented. Compared to previous methods presented for the biharmonic equation our method appears more efficient. The theory is implemented and numerical tests presented that demonstrate the performance of the method for varying problem sizes and accuracy requirements. In our implementation, the FMM for the biharmonic equation is faster than direct matrix–vector product for a matrix size of 550 for a relative L2 accuracy ϵ2 = 10−4, and N = 3550 for ϵ2 = 10−12.