Analysis of thin-walled structural elements via 3D standard BEM with generic substructuring

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the application of standard 3D Boundary Element Methods to solve thin-walled structural elements (needle-like/shell-like solids). A subregion-by-subregion data structure, incorporating iterative solvers and discontinuous boundary elements, is presented. To efficiently and accurately evaluate the quasi-singular integrals, special quadrature methods are applied. In addition, structured matrix-vector products, designed to avoid the excessive number of conditional tests during solver iterations, are proposed. Numerical results for complex thin-walled BE models are validated by comparison with FEM calculations and previously published BEM analyses.