Abstract
Introducing an electric conductor into a region pervaded by an initial electric potential perturbs that potential by inducing a charge distribution on the conductor's surface, necessary to guarantee that the surface is an equipotential of the total potential. Some numerical method is required to compute the perturbation potential, when the conductor's shape does not admit a standard analytic solution. For two‐dimensional situations, a method is proposed for solving for the perturbation potential that involves expansion of the boundary perturbation potential and its normal derivative as truncated Fourier series. This boundary potential is known to within an additive constant from the requirement that its sum with the initial potential must be a constant. The standard representation theorem for the Dirichlet problem gives a consistency relation between the boundary function and its normal derivative, which here becomes a set of linear algebraic relations between Fourier series coefficients, with matrix entries found by appropriate applications of the fast Fourier transform. These are solved for the boundary derivative coefficients; at any point exterior to the conductor, the perturbation potential can then be evaluated from the two sets of Fourier coefficients, using further application of the fast Fourier transform. Examples are shown for two conductor shapes, with several initial potentials. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 17: 673–683, 2001