Boundary Integral Equations

This is the second edition of the book which has two additional new chapters on Maxwell’s equations as well as a section on properties of solution spaces of Maxwell’s equations and their trace spaces. These two new chapters, which summarize the most up-to-date results in the literature for the Maxwell’s equations, are sufficient enough to serve as a self-contained introductory book on the modern mathematical theory of boundary integral equations in electromagnetics. The book now contains 12 chapters and is divided into two parts. The first six chapters present modern mathematical theory of boundary integral equations that arise in fundamental problems in continuum mechanics and electromagnetics based on the approach of variational formulations of the equations. The second six chapters present an introduction to basic classical theory of the pseudo-differential operators. The aforementioned corresponding boundary integral operators can now be recast as pseudo-differential operators. These serve as concrete examples that illustrate the basic ideas of how one may apply the theory of pseudo-differential operators and their calculus to obtain additional properties for the corresponding boundary integral operators. These two different approaches are complementary to each other. Both serve as the mathematical foundation of the boundary element methods, which have become extremely popular and efficient computational tools for boundary problems in applications. This book contains a wide spectrum of boundary integral equations arising in fundamental problems in continuum mechanics and electromagnetics. The book is a major scholarly contribution to the modern approaches of boundary integral equations, and should be accessible and useful to a large community of advanced graduate students and researchers in mathematics, physics, and engineering.

This book provides a detailed description of fast boundary element methods, all based on rigorous mathematical analysis. In particular, the authors use a symmetric formulation of boundary integral equations as well as discussing Galerkin discretisation. All the necessary related stability and error estimates are derived. The authors therefore describe the Adaptive Cross Approximation Algorithm, starting from the basic ideas and proceeding to their practical realization. Numerous examples representing standard problems are given.

by the author to the English edition The book aims to present a powerful new tool of computational mechanics, complex variable boundary integral equations (CV-BIE). The book is conceived as a continuation of the classical monograph by N. I. Muskhelishvili into the computer era. Two years have passed since the Russian edition of the present book. We have seen growing interest in numerical simulation of media with internal structure, and have evidence of the potential of the new methods. The evidence was especially clear in problems relating to multiple grains, blocks, cracks, inclusions and voids. This prompted me, when preparing the English edition, to place more emphasis on such topics. The other change was inspired by Professor Graham Gladwell. It was he who urged me to abridge the chain of formulae and to increase the number of examples. Now the reader will find more examples showing the potential and advantages of the analysis. The first chapter of the book contains a simple exposition of the theory of real variable potentials, including the hypersingular potential and the hypersingular equations. This makes up for the absence of such exposition in current textbooks, and reveals important links between the real variable BIE and the complex variable counterparts. The chapter may also help readers who are learning or lecturing on the boundary element method.

This 2000 book provided the first detailed exposition of the mathematical theory of boundary integral equations of the first kind on non-smooth domains.

Harmonic and biharmonic boundary value problems (BVP) arising in physical situations in fluid mechanics are, in general, intractable by analytic techniques. In the last decade there has been a rapid increase in the application of integral equation techniques for the numerical solution of such problems [1,2,3]. One such method is the boundary integral equation method (BIE) which is based on Green's Formula [4] and enables one to reformulate certain BVP as integral equations. The reformulation has the effect of reducing the dimension of the problem by one. Because discretisation occurs only on the boundary in the BIE the system of equations generated by a BIE is considerably smaller than that generated by an equivalent finite difference (FD) or finite element (FE) approximation [5]. Application of the BIE in the field of fluid mechanics has in the past been limited almost entirely to the solution of harmonic problems concerning potential flows around selected geometries [3,6,7]. Little work seems to have been done on direct integral equation solution of viscous flow problems. Coleman [8] solves the biharmonic equation describing slow flow between two semi infinite parallel plates using a complex variable approach but does not consider the effects of singularities arising in the solution domain. Since the vorticity at any singularity becomes unbounded then the methods presented in [8] cannot achieve accurate results throughout the entire flow field.

This book presents and explains a general, efficient, and elegant method for solving the Dirichlet, Neumann, and Robin boundary value problems for the extensional deformation of a thin plate on an elastic foundation. The solutions of these problems are obtained both analytically—by means of direct and indirect boundary integral equation methods (BIEMs)—and numerically, through the application of a boundary element technique. The text discusses the methodology for constructing a BIEM, deriving all the attending mathematical properties with full rigor. The model investigated in the book can serve as a template for the study of any linear elliptic two-dimensional problem with constant coefficients. The representation of the solution in terms of single-layer and double-layer potentials is pivotal in the development of a BIEM, which, in turn, forms the basis for the second part of the book, where approximate solutions are computed with a high degree of accuracy. The book is intended for graduate students and researchers in the fields of boundary integral equation methods, computational mechanics and, more generally, scientists working in the areas of applied mathematics and engineering. Given its detailed presentation of the material, the book can also be used as a text in a specialized graduate course on the applications of the boundary element method to the numerical computation of solutions in a wide variety of problems.

The computational power currently available means that practitioners can find extremely accurate approximations to the solutions of more and more sophisticated mathematical models-providing they know the right analytical techniques. In relatively simple terms, this book describes a class of techniques that fulfill this need by providing closed-form solutions to many boundary value problems that arise in science and engineering. Boundary integral equation methods (BIEM's) have certain advantages over other procedures for solving such problems: BIEM's are powerful, applicable to a wide variety of situations, elegant, and ideal for numerical treatment. Certain fundamental constructs in BIEM's are also essential ingredients in boundary element methods, often used by scientists and engineers. However, BIEM's are also sometimes more difficult to use in plane cases than in their three-dimensional counterparts. Consequently, the full, detailed BIEM treatment of two-dimensional problems has been largely neglected in the literature-even when it is more than marginally different from that applied to the corresponding three-dimensional versions. This volume discusses three typical cases where such differences are clear: the Laplace equation (one unknown function), plane strain (two unknown functions), and the bending of plates with transverse shear deformation (three unknown functions). The author considers each of these with Dirichlet, Neumann, and Robin boundary conditions. He subjects each to a thorough investigation-with respect to the existence and uniqueness of regular solutions-through several BIEM's. He proposes suitable generalizations of the concept of logarithmic capacity for plane strain and bending of plates, then uses these to identify contours where non-uniqueness may occur. In the final section, the author compares and contrasts the various solution representations, links them by means of boundary operators, and evaluates them for their suitability for

In addition to theory, this study focuses on practical application and computer implementation in a coherent introduction to boundary integrals, boundary element and singularity methods for steady and unsteady flow at zero Reynolds numbers.