The Qualocation Method for Symm's Integral Equation on a Polygon

This paper discusses the convergence of the qualocation method for Symm's integral equation on closed polygonal boundaries in IR 2 . Qualocation is a Petrov‐Galerkin method in which the outer integrals are performed numerically by special quadrature rules. Before discretisation a nonlinear parametrisation of the polygon is introduced which varies more slowly than arc‐length near each corner and leads to a transformed integral equation with a regular solution. We prove that the qualocation method using smoothest splines of any order k on a uniform mesh (with respect to the new parameter) converges with optimal order O ( h k ). Furthermore, the method is shown to produce superconvergent approximations to linear functionals, retaining the same high convergence rates as in the case of a smooth curve.