Mixed finite element method and higher-order local artificial boundary conditions for exterior 3-D Poisson equation

The mixed finite element method is used to solve the exterior Poisson equations with higher-order local artificial boundary conditions in 3-D space. New unknowns are introduced to reduce the order of the derivatives of the unknown to two. The result is an equivalent mixed variational problem which was solved using bilinear finite elements. The primary advantage is that special finite elements are not needed on the adjacent layer of the artificial boundary for the higher-order derivatives. Error estimates are obtained for some local artificial boundary conditions with prescibed orders. A numerical example demonstrates the effectiveness of this method.