Boundary Element Formulations

The boundary element method has evolved rapidly within the past decade and is now recognized as a reliable and efficient alternative to finite element and finite difference procedures, especially for problems encountered in Potential Theory and Elasto-statics. The technique consists in transforming the partial differential equations which govern the behavior in the domain over to a set of integral equations relating quantities associated with the boundary, and applying numerical procedures to generate approximate solutions for the boundary variables. This paper describes a general procedure, based on the weighted residual approach, for transforming the differential equations to integral expressions that form the basis for the Direct Boundary Element Method, and shows that boundary element and finite element methods can be interpreted as variants of the fundamental weak formulation for the problem.