Geometrically nonlinear analysis of a Reissner type plate by the boundary element method

The boundary element method is used in the geometrically nonlinear analysis of laterally loaded isotropic plates taking into account the effects of transverse shear deformation. This paper presents the general equations for finite deformation of a Reissner type plate, and also gives an integral formulation of the Von Kármán type nonlinear governing equations which involve coupling between in-plane and out-of-plane deformation. The boundary and the domain of the plate are discretized to solve nonlinear plate bending problems. All unknown variables are at the boundary. An iterative procedure is applied to achieve linearization of the nonlinear equations. Some numerical results of the computation are compared with the analytical solutions and other numerical techniques, and good agreement is obtained.     

Dynamic analysis of beams by the boundary element method

Free and forced flexural vibrations of beams are numerically studied with the aid of the direct boundary element method. The free vibration case is treated as an eigenvalue problem, while the forced vibration one is treated with the aid of the Laplace transform. The structural dynamic response is finally obtained by a numerical inversion of the transformed solution. The effects of a constant axial force, external viscous or internal viscoelastic damping, and an elastic foundation on the response are also considered. Various numerical examples serve to illustrate the method and demonstrate its advantages and disadvantages.     

A new complex-valued formulation and eigenvalue analysis of the Helmholtz equation by boundary element method

By considering the close relationship between the multiple reciprocity boundary element formulation and that of the fundamental solution of the Helmholtz differential operator, we present a new complex-valued integral equation formulation for the eigenvalue analysis of the scalar-valued Helmholtz equation. Eigenvalues are determined as local minima of the determinant of the coefficient matrix of the discretized equation iteratively by the Newton scheme. The necessary recurrence formula is derived and computed with high efficiency, due to polynomial representation of the matrix components. Some example computations demonstrate the utility of the proposed formulation and eigenvalue determination scheme, and construction of adaptive boundary elements for the eigenvalue determination is attempted.     

Acceleration of boundary element method by explicit vectorization

Although parallelization of computationally intensive algorithms has become a standard with the scientific community, the possibility of in-core vectorization is often overlooked. With the development of modern HPC architectures, however, neglecting such programming techniques may lead to inefficient code hardly utilizing the theoretical performance of nowadays CPUs. The presented paper reports on explicit vectorization for quadratures stemming from the Galerkin formulation of boundary integral equations in 3D. To deal with the singular integral kernels, two common approaches including the semi-analytic and fully numerical schemes are used. We exploit modern SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instruction sets to speed up the assembly of system matrices based on both of these regularization techniques. The efficiency of the code is further increased by standard shared-memory parallelization techniques and is demonstrated on a set of numerical experiments.     

Shape sensitivity analysis using the indirect boundary element method

The paper describes a novel formulation for the computation of the design sensitivities required for shape optimization problems using the indirect boundary element method. As a first stage, the system of equations that evaluate the fictitious traction sensitivities is differentiated with respect to shape design variables. The stress or displacement sensitivities are then evaluated by direct substitution of the fictitious traction sensitivities into the differentiated stress or displacement kernels. Two other finite difference-based techniques for the evaluation of the stress sensitivities, using the indirect boundary element method are also presented. The advantages and the drawbacks of each approach are discussed. These methods have been shown to be effective, accurate and can be incorporated in an existing BE code with much less programming effort than other BE-based techniques. The efficiency of the three methods is illustrated by optimizing the shape of a 90° V-notch. In all cases, convergence is achieved within three to four iterations.Various approximate techniques are suggested to minimize the computation cost of the optimization problem. These techniques are based on the fundamental features of the stress field, the differentiated kernels and the system of matrices of the optimization problem. Investigations have shown that employing these techniques yields more than a 50% reduction in computer time with insignificant loss of accuracy.     

Three-dimensional eigenvalue analysis of the Helmholtz equation by multiple reciprocity boundary element method

The eigenvalue of the three-dimensional Helmholtz equation is determined efficiently by extending the previously developed method for the two-dimensional problem. Boundary integral equation is formulated in the realm of the multiple reciprocity method, using higher order fundamental solutions for the Laplace equation; yielding polynomial coefficient matrices in terms of unknown wavenumber (eigenvalue). The Newton iteration method with the help of LU decomposition is employed to search eigenvalue, which can reduce the computational task significantly.     

Postbuckling analysis of plates on an elastic foundation by the boundary element method

The postbuckling behavior of plates on an elastic foundation is studied by using the boundary element method (BEM). A new fundamental solution of lateral deflection is derived through the resolution theory of a differential operator, and a set of boundary element formulae in incremental form is presented. By using these formulae, the BEM solution procedure becomes relatively simple. The results of a number of numerical examples are compared with existing solutions and good agreement is observed. It shows that the proposed method is effective for solving the postbuckling problems of plates with arbitrary shape and various boundary conditions.     

Lower bound limit analysis by the symmetric Galerkin boundary element method and the Complex method

A solution procedure for lower bound limit analysis is presented making use of the Symmetric Galerkin Boundary Element Method (SGBEM) rather than of finite element method. The self-equilibrium stress fields are expressed by linear combination of several basic self-equilibrium stress fields with parameters to be determined. These basic self-equilibrium stress fields are expressed as elastic responses of the body to imposed permanent strains obtained through elastic–plastic incremental analysis. The Complex method is used to solve nonlinear programming and determine the maximal load amplifier. The numerical results show that it is efficient and accurate to solve limit analysis problems by using the SGBEM and the Complex method.     

A solution technique for cathodic protection with dynamic boundary conditions by the boundary element method

This article is concerned with the application of the Boundary Element Method to cathodic protection problems of submerged structures using polarization curves depending upon time and formation potential. These curves have been adjusted from potentiostatic data obtained from in-situ experiments, yielding a nonlinear functional representation. The solution technique adopts stepwise linearized polarization curves and is employed for sufficiently small time steps. The influence of varying formation potential is introduced into the analysis under two alternative hypotheses here designated fictitious time and fictitious potential.     

Dynamic elastoplastic analysis of 3-D structures by the domain/boundary element method

The main objective of this paper is to present a general three-dimensional boundary element methodology for solving transient dynamic elastoplastic problems. The elastostatic fundamental solution is used in writing the integral representation and this creates in addition to the surface integrals, volume integrals due to inertia and inelasticity. Thus, an interior discretization in addition to the usual surface discretization is necessary. Isoparametric linear quadrilateral elements are used for the surface discretization and isoparametric linear hexahedra for the interior discretization. Advanced numerical integration techniques for singular and nearly singular integrals are employed. Houbolt's step-by-step numerical time integration algorithm is used to provide the dynamic response. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the method and demonstrate its accuracy.     

A Boundary Element Method for Simulation of Deformable Objects

In this paper,a boundary element method is first applied to real-tim animation of deformable objects and to simplify data preparation.Next,the visibleexternal surface of the object in deforming process is represented by B-spline surface,whose control points are embedded in dynamic equations of BEM.Fi-nally,the above method is applied to anatomical simulation.A pituitary model in human brain,which is reconstructed from a set of anatomical sections, is selected to be the deformable object under action of virtual tool such as scapel or probe.It produces fair graphic realism and high speed performance.The results show that BEM not only has less computational expense than FEM,but also is convenient to combine with the 3D reconstruction and surface modeling as it enables the reduction of the dimensionality of the problem by one.     

Inverse analysis FOR two-dimensional structures using the boundary element method

Inverse analysis is currently an important subject of study in several fields of science and engineering. The identification of physical and geometric parameters using experimental measurements is required in many applications. In this work a boundary element formulation to identify boundary and interface values as well as material properties is proposed. In particular the proposed formulation is dedicated to identifying material parameters when a cohesive crack model is assumed for 2D problems. A computer code is developed and implemented using the BEM multi-region technique and regularisation methods to perform the inverse analysis. Several examples are shown to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed model.     

Dynamic inelastic structural analysis by boundary element methods

Summary Boundary element methodologies for the determination of the response of inelastic two-and three-dimensional solids and structures as well as beams and flexural plates to dynamic loads are briefly presented and critically discussed. Elastoplastic and viscoplastic material behaviour in the framework of small deformation theories are considered. These methodologies can be separated into four main categories: those which employ the elastodynamic fundamental solution in their formulation, those which employ the elastostatic fundamental solution in their formulation, those which combine boundary and finite elements for the creation of an efficient hybrid scheme and those representing special boundary element techniques. The first category, in addition to the boundary discretization, requires a discretization of those parts of the interior domain expected to become inelastic, while the second category a discretization of the whole interior domain, unless the inertial domain integrals are transformed by the dual reciprocity technique into boundary ones, in which case only the inelastic parts of the domain have to be discretized. The third category employs finite elements for one part of the structure and boundary elements for its remaining part in an effort to combine the advantages of both methods. Finally, the fourth category includes special boundary element techniques for inelastic beams and plates and symmetric boundary element formulations. The discretized equations of motion in all the above methodologies are solved by efficient step-by-step time integration algorithms. Numerical examples involving two-and three-dimensional solids and structures and flexural plates are presented to illustrate all these methodologies and demonstrate their advantages. Finally, directions for future research in the area are suggested.     

On time-harmonic elastic-wave analysis by the boundary element method for moderate to high frequencies

Certain inherent difficulties in obtaining accurate boundary element solutions to problems of elastodynamics at moderate to high frequencies are examined. Some procedures for overcoming or compensating for these difficulties are described. In addition, results demonstrating the effectiveness of these procedures are presented. Finally, the use of these procedures in solving transient problems via Fourier-transform inversion is illustrated.     

A mixed finite element method for boundary flux computation

Most finite element schemes for thermal problems estimate boundary heat flux directly from the derivative of the finite element solution. The boundary flux calculated by this approach is typically inaccurate and does not guarantee a global heat balance.In this paper we present a mixed finite element method for calculating the boundary flux and show the superiority of this method through numerical examples of both diffusion and advection-diffusion problems.     

Analysis of thin piezoelectric solids by the boundary element method

The piezoelectric boundary integral equation (BIE) formulation is applied to analyze thin piezoelectric solids, such as thin piezoelectric films and coatings, using the boundary element method (BEM). The nearly singular integrals existing in the piezoelectric BIE as applied to thin piezoelectric solids are addressed for the 2-D case. An efficient analytical method to deal with the nearly singular integrals in the piezoelectric BIE is developed to accurately compute these integrals in the piezoelectric BEM, no matter how close the source point is to the element of integration. Promising BEM results with only a small number of elements are obtained for thin films and coatings with the thickness-to-length ratio as small as 10⁻⁶, which is sufficient for modeling many thin piezoelectric films as used in smart materials and micro-electro-mechanical systems.     

Finite element analysis of coupled constituent diffusion in thermoelastic solids

A finite element theory, suitable for describing the transient mass diffusion of a mobile constituent in a deformable thermoelastic solid, is presented. The theory considers the effects of coupling between concentration, temperature, and strain on a diffusing constituent in a parent solid. Numerical results are compared with closed-form analytical solutions of one-dimensional coupled diffusion problems. Numerical results are also compared with experimental data on internal hydrogen diffusion in beta-phase titanium alloys subjected to bending stress.     

Efficient error estimation and adaptive meshing method for boundary element analysis

This paper describes a new and efficient error estimator by using the Direct Regular Method and h or h-r adaptive meshing for BEM analysis. This posteriori error estimator correctly indicates the discretization errors on each element. Based on the error distribution, and the adaptive meshing is generated automatically. The accuracy and convergence of this method are demonstrated by the numerical results on the stress concentration problem and the crack problem.     

Partitioning technique for boundary element method

The partitioning technique and its Fortran subroutines for the solution of a non-symmetrical fully populated matrix system encountered in the boundary element method are presented. The technique is such that the computer backing store is fully utilized and therefore a large-scale problem can be solved with a small computer. The derivation of formulae for this technique is given in detail. A corresponding computer program is developed and verified through two two-dimensional elastostatic problems. The influence of submatrix size on cost of computation time is discussed.