Application of Fast Multipole Boundary Method in Elastostatic Problems

Finite Element Method (FEM1) is pervasively used in most of 3D product design analysis, in which Computer Aided Design (CAD) models need to be converted in to mesh models first and then enriched with some material features and boundary conditions data, etc. The interaction between CAD models and FEM models is intensive. Boundary Element Method (BEM) has been expected to be advantageous in large-scale problems in recent years owing to its reduction of the dimensionality and its reduced complexity in mesh generation. However, the BEM application has so far been limited to relatively small problems due to the memory and computational complexity for matrix buildup are O(N2). The fast multipole BEM (FMBEM) combined with BEM and fast multipole method (FMM) can overcome the defect of the traditional BEM, and provides an effective method to solve the large-scale problem. Combining GPU parallel computing with FMBEM can further improve its efficiency significantly. Based on the three-dimensional elastic mechanics problems, the parallelisms of the multipole moment (ME), multipole moment to multipole moment (M2M) translation, multipole moment to local expansion (M2L) translation, local expansion to local expansion (L2L) translation and near-field direct calculation were analyzed respectively according to the characteristics of the FMM, and the parallel strategies under CUDA were presented in this paper. Three main major parts are included herein: (1) FMBEM theory in 3D elastostatics, (2) the parallel FMBEM algorithm using CUDA, and (3) comparison the GPU parallel FMBEM with BEM, FEM and FMBEM respectively by engineering examples. Numerical example results show the 3D elastostatics GPU FMBEM not only can speed up the boundary element calculation process, but also save memory which can be effective to solve the large-scale engineering problems.

The computation of the acoustic scattering from objects in the ocean is useful to analyze the characteristics of the targets, which can be numerically modelled by acoustic boundary element method (BEM). The BEM has a defect of fictitious frequency problem, Burton-Miller method is studied to overcome the singular problems. In this paper, the Hadamard finite-part integral method based on collocation method is studied to overcome the singularity. It is found that, the near singularity is also quite significant and deteriorates largely the accuracy of BEM. A method based on polar transformation is proposed in this paper to overcome such a defect. Once the problems of singularity and near-singularity are solved, the conventional BEM model is established to serve as a foundation for fast BEM.It is well known that conventional BEM yields a full matrix, which is of O(N <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ) memory complexity. Furthermore, the time complexity could be up to O(N <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> ), if Gaussian elimination method is adopted to solve the linear equation of BEM. Many fast methods are proposed to solve the problems, such as the GMRES iterative solver, fast multipole method and H-matrix (Hierarchical Matrices) method. H-matrix method is applied to overcome the faults of conventional BEM, by using the low-rank approximations to compress blocks of the matrix, which is a pure algebraic method. The ACA (Adaptive Cross Approximation) method is proposed to compute the outer-product form of low-rank matrices, instead of SVD (Singular Value Decomposition), which consumes high CPU time and is of no usability. ACA-BEM is used to predict the acoustic scattering from objects in the ocean, especially the large-scale problems. The directivities of a rigid sphere and a rigid ellipsoid are computed by ACA BEM, the time consumed is very short. For a problem of more than 20,000 DOFs, it can be solved within 2 minutes. Therefore, ACA BEM can be used to solve large-scale acoustic scattering problems very efficiently.

Standard numerical models in acoustics rely on the isentropic Helmholtz equation. Its derivation assumes adiabatic and reversible, i.e., dissipation-free, wave propagation. Sound waves in fluids are, however, subject to viscous and thermal losses. These losses originate from viscous friction and heat conduction, leading to the formation of acoustic boundary layers. Considering these effects becomes significant in setups with acoustic cavities of similar dimension as the boundary layers. Recently, boundary element methods (BEM) accounting for the viscothermal dissipation have been proposed. These methods limit the discretization to the surface of the fluid domain and require significantly fewer degrees of freedom than comparable finite element models. However, the BEM coefficient matrices are fully populated, resulting in high computational costs and storage requirements. This study develops a new BEM formulation for acoustics in viscothermal fluids that uses the fast multipole method - a low-rank approximation technique based on a hierarchical subdivision of the computational domain - to alleviate this shortcoming. It is shown that the fast viscothermal BEM improves the algorithmic complexity over the conventional formulation, reducing both the memory requirements and solution time. The results indicate good scalability of the method making it feasible for larger applications such as acoustic metamaterials.

A modified dual-level fast multipole boundary element method based on the Burton–Miller formulation for large-scale three-dimensional sound field analysis

It is suitable to solve the acoustic problems by using the fast multipole boundary element method (FMBEM), since the FMBEM can accelerate the matrix-vector multiplication dramatically by reducing the CPU time and memory of conventional boundary element method to O(N log2N) and O(N) respectively. We propose a 3D acoustic FMBEM based on Burton-Miller formulation in this paper. A new adaptive algorithm is applied to the diagonal form FMBEM, and a new proposed analytical moment formulation is used in the moment computation. Both of them further improve the efficiency of FMBEM. Acoustic scattering of soft sphere at resonant frequency is investigated to validate the accuracy of solution using Burton-Miller formulation. Comparisons of solution to the multi-radiating spheres problem with the one solved by Bapat's program demonstrate the accuracy and the efficiency of our algorithm in solving large-scale acoustic problems. In the end, we use our algorithm to analyze the inner sound filed of a car and dolphin acoustic scattering.

An adaptive dual-information FMBEM for 3D elasticity and its GPU implementation

A numerical solution for the diffraction of linear waves around a vertical cylinder is presented in this paper using the fast multipole boundary element method (FMBEM). The fast multipole method (FMM) is employed to accelerate the traditional boundary element method. The accuracy and efficiency of the FMBEM for 2D Helmholtz equation is demonstrated, and it’s proved that this approach is suitable for solving large-scaled problems. In addition, numerical results of water dynamics coefficients, which are related to the diffraction problems of linear waves around a cylinder, are supplied in this paper.

The complex variable fast multipole boundary element method for the analysis of strongly inhomogeneous media

We propose a fast implementation of the boundary element method for solving the Poisson equation, which approximately determines the electrostatic field around solvated molecules of arbitrary shape. The method presented uses computational resources of order O(N) only, where N is the number of elements representing the dielectric boundary at the molecular surface. The method is based on the Fast Multipole Algorithm by Rokhlin and Greengard, which is used to calculate the Coulombic interaction between surface elements in linear time. We calculate the solvation energies of a sphere, a small polar molecule, and a moderately sized protein. The values obtained by the boundary element method agree well with results from finite difference calculations and show a higher degree of consistency due to the absence of grid dependencies. The boundary element method can be taken to a much higher accuracy than is possible with finite difference methods and can therefore be used to verify their validity. © 1995 by John Wiley &amp; Sons, Inc.

A fast multilevel multipole algorithm (FMM) is derived for the Helmholtz equation and adopted to the symmetric Galerkin boundary element method (BEM) for acoustics.The FMM allows to evaluate a matrix-vector product of the BEM with a computational cost of O(N log 2 N ), thus leading to a significant reduction of computation time and memory requirements compared to standard BEM formulations.This allows the simulation of large scale acoustic models.A coupling algorithm based on Lagrange multipliers is proposed for the simulation of structure-acoustic field interaction.Finite plate elements are coupled to a Galerkin boundary element formulation of the acoustic domain.The interface pressure is interpolated as a Lagrange multiplier, thus, allowing the coupling of non-matching grids.The resulting saddle point problem is solved by an approximate Uzawa-type scheme in which the matrix-vector products of the boundary element operators are evaluated efficiently by the fast multipole boundary element method.The algorithm is demonstrated on the example of a cavity backed elastic panel.

Fast multipole boundary element method using the binary tree structure with tight bounds: application to a calculation of an electrostatic force for the manipulation of a metal micro particle ☆

Abstract: In this paper, a half space adaptive fast multipole boundary facemethod (FMBFM) is presented for solving the three-dimensional half space ex-terior acoustic problems. In the presented method, the Burton-Miller equationbased on the conventional boundary integral equation (CBIE) and its hyper-singularboundary integral equation (HBIE) is used to deal with the fictitious eigenfrequen-cies problem. The half space Green’s function is employed, thus the tree structurein the fast multipole method can be used only for the real domain. The higher orderelements and an adaptive tree structure are used to improve the efficiency of theFMBFM. This half space adaptive FMBFM for half space acoustic problems is anextension of the adaptive FMBFM for full space acoustic problems developed bythe authors. Numerical examples for half space acoustic problems in this paperdemonstrate the efficiency and validity of this method.Keywords: fast multipole boundary face method, Burton-Miller equation, acous-tic problems, half space, modified hyper-singular boundary integral equation1 IntroductionAcoustic problems in half space are a major subject in engineering. Many researchworks have been done on this aspect (Seybert et al., 1988; Secgin et al., 2010; Caoet al., 2010). The half space Green’s function (Seybert et al., 1988) can be appliedby adding the source solution at the image point to the original full-space Green’sfunction for dealing with half space problems. Sound source localization and iden-tification of a refrigerator were accomplished by using the half space boundaryelement method (BEM) (Secgin et al., 2010). Using the half space Green’s func-tion, the discretization of the rigid infinite plane is removed and only the boundaries

This paper describes an application of the fast multipole boundary element method (FMBEM) in simulating the viscoelastic behavior of asphalt concrete (AC). FMBEM has some merits including easy meshing of complicated geometries, accuracy in solving singular fields, high calculation efficiency, and low data storage requirements. These merits lead to many applications in multiple time-step and multi-inclusion problems, such as prediction of AC creep behavior. In this paper, a fast multipole formulation and an algorithm for two-dimensional linear viscoelastic problems are introduced first. To consider the bonding between the asphalt matrix and aggregates, a viscoelastic interface model is used to simulate the interfacial imperfection. A numerical model of asphalt concrete is then constructed based on image processing techniques, and the model is capable of taking into account the effects of the size and content of the air voids. The creep compliance of AC is predicted by the developed FMBEM arithmetic and subsequently compared with the experimental results. It has been shown that the developed method can describe and simulate the correct creep evolutionary trend of AC. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)MT.1943- 5533.0000603. © 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers. CE Database subject headings: Asphalts; Concrete; Micromechanics; Viscoelasticity; Imaging techniques; Boundary element method. Author keywords: Asphalt concrete; Micromechanics; Fast multipole boundary element method; Viscoelastic properties; Image processing technique.

A boundary condition (BC) related mixed element method is presented to address the corner problem in boundary element method (BEM) for 3D elastostatic problems. In this method, noncontinuous elements (NCEs) are only used at the displacement-prescribed corners/edges and continuous elements (CEs) in other places, which can decrease the degrees of freedom (DOFs) compared to the approach using NCEs at all corners/edges. Moreover, an automatic generation algorithm of BC related mixed linear triangular elements is implemented with the help of 3D modeling engine ACIS, and the boundary element analysis (BEA) is integrated into CAD systems. In order to solve large scale problems, the fast multipole BEM (FMBEM) with mixed elements is proposed and utilized in the BEA. The examples show that the node shift scheme adopting 1/4 is optimal and the BEM/FMBEM using mixed elements can produce more accurate results by only increasing a small number of DOFs.

The aim of this study is the numerical simulation of installation effects on acoustic radiation of aircraft power plant systems, taking into account all surfaces involved in airframe/engine interaction. More precisely, we are interested in determining the delta in acoustic pressure level and directivity for different deflected angles of the flaps. Compared to the numerical assessment of noise radiation of an isolated engine, the computational domain is becoming very large in terms of wavelengths. It is for this reason that a new methodology has been developed. The principle of the method lies in the breakdown of the initial problem, and so the initial study domain, into two non-connected parts: the first one contains the power plant system, the second one contains the rest of the aircraft. In the first domain, we use a conventional Boundary Element Method (BEM) code. In the second domain a modified BEM code is used: based on Fast Multipole Method (FMM), this code provides a drastic reduction of data storage and computational time. That is the reason why the code is appropriate to the large computational domain. The first step of the methodology presented here is a weak-coupling formulation as only flap position effects are studied.