The boundary contour method for three-dimensional linear elasticity with a new quadratic boundary element

Abstract

This paper presents further developments of the Boundary Contour Method (BCM) for three-dimensional (3-D) linear elasticity. A hallmark of the BCM is that surface integrals on boundary elements of the usual Boundary Element Method (BEM) are transformed, through an application of Stokes' theorem, into line integrals on the boundary contours of these elements. The specific contributions of the present work are: (a) explicit use of the rigid body mode to regularize the BCM and avoid computation of the corner tensor and (b) incorporation of an improved quadratic boundary element. New numerical results on bodies with curved surfaces, obtained from BCM, are uniformly accurate.