A fast boundary cloud method for 3D exterior electrostatic analysis

An accelerated boundary cloud method (BCM) for boundary‐only analysis of 3D electrostatic problems is presented here. BCM uses scattered points unlike the classical boundary element method (BEM) which uses boundary elements to discretize the surface of the conductors. BCM combines the weighted least‐squares approach for the construction of approximation functions with a boundary integral formulation for the governing equations. A linear base interpolating polynomial that can vary from cloud to cloud is employed. The boundary integrals are computed by using a cell structure and different schemes have been used to evaluate the weakly singular and non‐singular integrals. A singular value decomposition (SVD) based acceleration technique is employed to solve the dense linear system of equations arising in BCM. The performance of BCM is compared with BEM for several 3D examples. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.