The analysis of solids without mesh generation using trimmed patch boundary elements

The tools available to the mechanical engineer—for example, geometric modeling and computer-aided analysis—are individually quite powerful, but they are based on different geometric representations. Hence, they do not always work well together. In this paper an analysis method is presented that operates directly on the geometric modeling representation. Therefore, the time-consuming and error-prone procedure of generating a mesh is skipped. The method is based on boundary integral equations, but unlike previously published methods, the boundary elements aren-sided trimmed patches, the same patches that are used by modern geometric modelers to represent complex solids. The method is made practical by defining shape functions over the trimmed patches in such a way that the number of degrees of freedom can be controlled. This is done by using a concept called virtual nodes. The paper begins by deriving the trimmed patch boundary element. Then its properties are discussed in comparison with existing boundary element and finite element methods, and several examples are given.