Analytical preconditioners for Neumann elastodynamic boundary element methods

The boundary element method (BEM) is an efficient numerical method that approximates solutions of various boundary value problems. Despite its success little research has been performed on the conditioning of the linear systems that appear in the BEM. For a Laplace equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions a remarkable phenomenon is observed; the corresponding boundary integral equation (BIE) is singular for a certain critical size of the 2D domain. As a consequence the discrete counterpart of the BIE, the linear system, is singular too, or at least ill-conditioned. This is reflected by the condition number of the system matrix, which is infinitely large, or at least very large. When the condition number of the BEM-matrix is large, the linear system is difficult to solve and the solution of the system is very sensible to perturbations in the boundary data. For a Laplace equation with mixed boundary conditions a similar phenomenon is observed. The corresponding BEM-matrix consists of two blocks; one block originates from the BEM-matrix belonging to the Dirichlet problem, the other block originates from the BEM-matrix belonging to the Neumann problem. The composite matrix inherits the solvability problems from the Dirichlet block. In other words, for the Laplace equation with mixed boundary conditions there exists also a critical size of the 2D domain for which the BEM-matrix has an infinitely large condition number. Hence the size and shape of the domain affects the solvability of the BEM problem. The critical size of the domain for which the BIE becomes singular is related to the logarithmic capacity of the domain. The logarithmic capacity is a positive real number that is a function of the size and shape of the domain. If this logarithmic capacity is equal to one, the domain is a critical domain, and for this domain the BIE becomes singular. Thus by computing the logarithmic capacity we can a-priori determine whether the BIE will be singular or not. The logarithmic capacity depends linearly on the scale of the domain, and thus a domain with logarithmic capacity equal to one can always be found by rescaling the domain. Unfortunately the logarithmic capacity can only be computed analytically for a few simple domains; for more involved domains the logarithmic capacity can be estimated though. There are several possibilities to avoid large condition numbers, i.e. singular BIEs that appear at critical domains. The first option is to rescale the domain such that the logarithmic capacity is unequal to one. One can also add a supplementary condition to the BIE and the linear system. A drawback of this option is that the linear system has more equations than unknowns and different techniques are required to solve the system. A third option is to slightly modify the fundamental solution of the Laplace operator. This fundamental solution directly appears in the BIE and it can be shown that a suitable modification yields BIEs that do not become singular. The critical domains for which the BIEs become singular do not restrict to Laplace equations only. Also for BIEs applied to the biharmonic equation or the elastostatic equations and the Stokes equations such critical domains exist. As the last two equations are vectorial equations, also the corresponding BIE consists of two equations. As a consequence two critical domains can be found for which these BIEs become singular. To obtain nonsingular BIEs techniques similar to the Laplace case can be used. Unfortunately we cannot a-priori determine the sizes for which the BIEs becomes singular, and thus do not know to what size we should rescale the domain to obtain nonsingular BIEs. The existence of critical domains is in essence caused by the logarithmic term in the fundamental solutions for the elliptic boundary value problems in 2D. This logarithmic term does not depend linearly on the size of the domain. When a domain is scaled, i.e. multiplied by a scale factor, the argument of the logarithm is also multiplied by this scale factor, but the logarithm turns this into an additive term. Thus the logarithm transforms multiplication into addition. This affects the BIEs in such a way that critical domains can appear. The fundamental solutions of boundary value problems in 3D do not contain a logarithmic term. Hence scaling of the domain does not affect the fundamental solution, and consequently also the BIE is not affected. Hence we may safely rescale 3D domains without the risk to encounter a critical domain. An example in which a domain takes many different sizes and shapes is the blowing problem. In this problem a viscous fluid is blown to a desired shape. Typically the time is discretised into a set of discrete time steps, and at each step the shape of the fluid is computed by solving the Stokes equations. When attempting to simulate this problem in 2D, we meet a large number of 2D domains, and we risk that one of these domains is equal to or approaches a critical domain. In such a case the BEM will have difficulties with solving the Stokes equations for that particular domain. When simulating the blowing problem in 3D, no critical domains are encountered. It turns out that the BEM is a very efficient numerical method for this particular 3D problem with a moving boundary. As we are merely interested in the shape of the fluid, we only need to know the flow of its boundary. The BEM does exactly that; it does not compute the flow at the interior of the fluid. Furthermore it is rather easy to include other effects from the blowing problem in the model, such as gravity, surface tension and friction from the contact of the fluid with a wall. As only the boundary of the fluid is discretised, the system matrices that appear in the BEM are smaller than the system matrices that appear when solving the problem with a finite element method, for example. Though the BEM-matrices are dense, while the finite element matrices are sparse, the computational effort for the BEM is relatively low. In short, the BEMis a very appropriate numerical method when solving blowing problems.

A fast direct boundary element method for 3D acoustic problems based on hierarchical matrices

A fast multi-level boundary element method for the Helmholtz equation

The boundary element method (BEM) is a numerical method for solving boundary-value or initial-value problems formulated by use of boundary integral equations. In the BEM, only the boundaries - that is, surfaces for three-dimensional problems or curves for two dimensional (2D) problems - of a problem domain need to be discretized. However the boundary element method (BEM) has been limited to solving problems with a few thousand degrees of freedom (DOFs) on a personal computer. This is because the conventional BEM, in general, produces dense and nonsymmetric matrices. The main idea of the fast multipole (FM) BEM is to employ iterative solvers to solve the BEM system of equations. Using this method we can solve models with more than one million equations on a laptop computer. In this paper, the governing equations for elasticity problems are reviewed first. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiencies of fast multipole method (FMM) for solving 2D elasticity problems.

Boundary Element Analysis of Cracks in Shear Deformable Plates and Shells. Topics in Engineering, Vol 43

A Monte Carlo solution method for linear elasticity

Many boundary integral equations for exterior boundary value problems for the Helmholtz equation suffer from a notorious instability for wave numbers related to interior resonances. The so-called combined field integral equations are not affected. However, if the boundary Γ is not smooth, the traditional combined field integral equations for the exterior Dirichlet problem do not give rise to an L2(Γ)-coercive variational formulation. This foils attempts to establish asymptotic quasi-optimality of discrete solutions obtained through conforming Galerkin boundary element schemes.This article presents new combined field integral equations on two-dimensional closed surfaces that possess coercivity in canonical trace spaces. The main idea is to use suitable regularizing operators in the framework of both direct and indirect methods. This permits us to apply the classical convergence theory of conforming Galerkin methods.

Application of boundary element method for elastodynamics to defect shape identification

The first section of this chapter collects results from [240] which gives a further contribution to the analysis of the hp-version of the boundary element method (BEM) by presenting a more general result for Dirichlet and Neumann problems than [21] allowing the use of a general geometric mesh refinement on the polygonal boundary Γ. Here as in [240] we prove the exponential convergence of the hp- version of the boundary element method by exploiting only features of the solutions of the boundary integral equations. The key result in this approach is an asymptotic expansion of the solution of the integral equations in singularity functions reflecting the singular behaviour of the solutions near corners of Γ. With such expansions we show that the solutions of the integral equations belong to countably normed spaces. Therefore these solutions can be approximated exponentially fast in the energy norm via the hp- Galerkin solutions of those integral equations. This result is not restricted to integral equations which stem from boundary value problems for the Laplacian but applies to Helmholtz problems as well. Further applications are 2D crack problems in linear elasticity. For numerical experiments with hp-version (BEM) see [165, 340].

Large-scale thermal analysis of fiber composites using a line-inclusion model by the fast boundary element method

The spurious eigenvalues of an annular domain have been verified for the singular and hypersingular boundary‐element methods (BEMs) and circumvented by using the Burton‐Miller approach. Do they also occur in other formulations: continuous formulations such as the singular and hypersingular boundary integral equations (BIEs), the null‐field BIEs and the fictitious BIEs, or such discrete formulations as the null‐field BEMs and the fictitious BEMs? For the ten formulations of the multiply connected problem the study of otherwise the same issues is continued in the present paper. By using the degenerate kernels and the Fourier series, it is demonstrated analytically for the six continuous formulations of BIEs that spurious eigensolutions depend on the geometry of the inner boundary but not on that of the outer boundary. This conclusion can be extended to the six discrete formulations of BEMs. To filter out the spurious eigenvalues, the CHIEF (combined Helmholtz integral equation formulation) method is used here instead of the Burton‐Miller approach. The optimum number and appropriate positions of the CHIEF points are also addressed. It is then shown that, in the null‐field and fictitious BEMs, the spurious and true eigenvalues can be detected and distinguished by using the singular‐value‐decomposition‐updating techniques in conjunction with the Fredholm alternative theorem. Illustrative examples show the validity of the proposed methodologies.

In this paper, we present four different formulations for the analysis of electromagnetic scattering from arbitrarily shaped three-dimensional (3-D) homogeneous dielectric body in the frequency domain. The four integral equations treated here are the electric field integral equation (EFIE), the magnetic field integral equation (MFIE), the combined field integral equation (CFIE), and the PMCHW (Poggio, Miller, Chang, Harrington, and Wu) formulation. For the CFIE case, we propose eight separate formulations with different combinations of expansion and testing functions that result in sixteen different formulations of CFIE. One of the objectives of this paper is to illustrate that not all CFIE are valid methodologies in removing defects, which occur at a frequency corresponding to an internal resonance of the structure. Numerical results involving the equivalent electric and magnetic currents, far scattered fields, and radar cross section (RCS) are presented for three canonical dielectric scatterers, viz. a sphere, a cube, and a finite circular cylinder, to illustrate which formulation works and which does not.

PurposeTwo-dimensional (2D) problems are governed by unsteady anisotropic modified-Helmholtz equation of time–space dependent coefficients are considered. The problems are transformed into a boundary-only integral equation which can be solved numerically using a standard boundary element method (BEM). Some examples are solved to show the validity of the analysis and examine the accuracy of the numerical method.Design/methodology/approach The 2D problems which are governed by unsteady anisotropic modified-Helmholtz equation of time–space dependent coefficients are solved using a combined BEM and Laplace transform. The time–space dependent coefficient equation is reduced to a time-dependent coefficient equation using an analytical transformation. Then, the time-dependent coefficient equation is Laplace transformed to get a constant coefficient equation, which can be written as a boundary-only integral equation. By utilizing a BEM, this integral equation is solved to find numerical solutions to the problems in the frame of the Laplace transform. These solutions are then inversely transformed numerically to obtain solutions in the original time–space frame.FindingsThe main finding of this research is the derivation of a boundary-only integral equation for the solutions of initial-boundary value problems governed by a modified-Helmholtz equation of time–space dependent coefficients for anisotropic functionally graded materials with time-dependent properties.Originality/valueThe originality of the research lies on the time dependency of properties of the functionally graded material under consideration.

In this paper, mathematical properties of variational solutions and boundary integral equation solutions of linear elasticity problems are studied. It is first noted that a variational solution of the three-dimensional linear elasticity problem exists in the Sobolev space [H1(Ω)]3. It is then shown that a unique solution of the boundary integral equation is identical to the variational solution in [H1(Ω)]3. To represent the boundary integral equation, Green's formula in the Sobolev space is utilized on the solution domain, excluding a ball, with small radius ρ that is centered at the point where the point load is applied. By letting ρ tend to zero, it is shown that, for the linear elasticity problem, the boundary integral expression is valid for the variational solution. From this fact, a numerical approximation of the variational solution can be obtained by the boundary element method, even when a classical solution does not exist.

The boundary element method (BEM) for linear elasticity in its curent usage is based on the boundary integral equation for displacements. The stress field in the interior of the body is computed by differentiating the displacement field at the source point in the BEM formulation, via the strain field. However, at the boundary, this method gives rise to a hypersingular integral relation which becomes numerically intractable. A novel approach is presented here, where hyper-singular kernels for stresses on the boundary are made numerically tractable through the imposition of certain equilibrated displacement modes. Numerical results are also presented for benchmark problems, to illustrate the efficacy of the present approach. Solutions are compared to the commonly used boundary stress algorithm wherein the boundary stresses are computed from known boundary tractions, and derivatives of known displacements tangential to the boundary. An extension of this approach to solve linear elasticity problems using the traction boundary integral equation (TBIE) is also discussed.