A comparison of the boundary element and superposition methods

For some time now, the Boundary Integral Equation (BIE) Method or as it is alternately called the Boundary Element Method (BEM) has been hailed as the technique best suited to problems in elasticity and related fields, both for accuracy and efficiency. The authors demonstrate by example that this is not the case. A much simpler and more versatile technique, the Superposition Method (SUP), is introduced and is shown to outperform BEM in both areas. Followed by a discussion of the merits and drawbacks of each method, compact computer programs for both BEM and SUP and numerical results for nine different example problems are presented to support the authors' claim.