Radial Basis Integral Equation Method Research Articles

Numerical investigation of the meshless radial basis integral equation method for solving 2D anisotropic potential problems

The radial basis integral equation (RBIE) method is derived for the first time to solve potential problems involving material anisotropy. The coefficients of the anisotropic conductivity require the gradient term to be modified accordingly when deriving the boundary integral equation so that the flux expression can be properly accounted. Analyses of the behavior of the anisotropic fundamental solution and its spatial gradients showed that their variations along the subdomain boundaries may be large and they increase as the diagonal components of the material anisotropy become larger. The accuracy of the anisotropic RBIE was found to depend primarily on the accuracy of the influence coefficients evaluations and this precedes the number of nodes used. Root mean squared errors of less than 10−4% can be obtained if evaluations of the influence coefficients are sufficiently accurate. An alternative formulation of the anisotropic RBIE was derived. The levels of accuracy obtained were not significantly different from the standard formulation.

Dispersion analysis of the meshless local boundary integral equation and radial basis integral equation methods for the Helmholtz equation

Numerical solutions of the Helmholtz equation suffer from pollution effect especially for higher wavenumbers. The major cause for this is the dispersion error which is defined as the relative phase difference between the numerical solution of the wave and the exact wave. The dispersion error for the meshless methods can be a priori determined at an interior source node assuming that the potential field obeys a harmonic evolution with the numerical wavenumber.In this paper, the dispersion errors, in the solution of 2D Helmholtz equation, for two different meshless methods are investigated, the local boundary integral equation method and the radial basis integral equation method. Radial basis functions, with second order polynomials and frequency-dependent polynomial basis vectors are used for the interpolation of the potential field in both methods. The results have been found to be of comparable accuracy with other meshless approaches reported in the literature.

Meshless solution of two-dimensional incompressible flow problems using the radial basis integral equation method

The two-dimensional incompressible fluid flow problems governed by the velocity–vorticity formulation of the Navier–Stokes equations were solved using the radial basis integral (RBIE) equation method. The RBIE is a meshless method based on the multi-domain boundary element method with overlapping subdomains. It solves at each node for the potential and its spatial derivatives. This feature of the RBIE is advantageous in solving the velocity–vorticity formulation of the Navier–Stokes equations since the calculated velocity gradients can be used to compute the vorticity that is prescribed as a boundary condition to the vorticity transport equation. The accuracy of the numerical solution was examined by solving the test problem with known analytical solution. Two benchmark problems, i.e. the lid driven cavity flow and the thermally driven cavity flow were also solved. The numerical results obtained using the RBIE showed very good agreement with the benchmark solutions.

Three-dimensional solution for acoustic and transport problems using the radial basis integral equation method

The radial basis integral equations method (RBIEM) has been applied for solution of three-dimensional (3D) acoustic and transport problems. The acoustic problem is often described using the Helmholtz equation, while the transport problems are usually described using the Laplace equation (diffusion only), the Poisson equation (diffusion with sources/sinks) and the convection–diffusion equation. The accuracy of the numerical scheme employing the first and second order Duchon splines augmented by first and second order polynomials, respectively, was examined. The effect of the number of interpolation points used in the radial basis function approximation on the condition number of the system was investigated. Numerical results obtained for the convection–diffusion equation were compared with the solutions obtained using the multi-domain dual reciprocity boundary element method (DRM-MD). The RBIEM formulation was found to be more accurate than the DRM-MD formulation. The implementation does not involve discretization over the boundaries of the subdomains used in the RBIEM formulation when evaluating the integrals.

The radial basis integral equation method for solving the Helmholtz equation

A meshless method for the solution of Helmholtz equation has been developed by using the radial basis integral equation method (RBIEM). The derivation of the integral equation used in the RBIEM is based on the fundamental solution of the Helmholtz equation, therefore domain integrals are not encountered in the method. The method exploits the advantage of placing the source points always in the centre of circular sub-domains in order to avoid singular or near-singular integrals. Three equations for two-dimensional (2D) or four for three-dimensional (3D) potential problems are required at each node. The first equation is the integral equation arising from the application of the Green’s identities and the remaining equations are the derivatives of the first equation with respect to space coordinates. Radial basis function (RBF) interpolation is applied in order to obtain the values of the field variable and partial derivatives at the boundary of the circular sub-domains, providing this way the boundary conditions for solution of the integral equations at the nodes (centres of circles). The accuracy and robustness of the method has been tested on some analytical solutions of the problem. Two different RBFs have been used, namely augmented thin plate spline (ATPS) in 2D and f(R)=R4ln(R) augmented by a second order polynomial. The latter has been found to produce more accurate results.

An efficient implementation of the radial basis integral equation method

An efficient and accurate implementation of the meshless radial basis integral equation method (RBIEM) is proposed. The proposed implementation does not involve discretization of the subdomains’ boundaries. By avoiding the boundary discretization, it was hypothesised that a significant source of error in the numerical scheme is avoided. The proposed numerical scheme was tested on two problems governed by the Poisson and Helmholtz equations. The test problems were selected such that the spatial gradients of the solutions were high to examine the robustness of the numerical scheme. The dual reciprocity method (DRM) and the cell integration technique were used to treat the domain integrals arising from the source terms in the partial differential equations. The results showed that the proposed implementation is more accurate and more robust than the previously suggested implementation of the RBIEM. Though the CPU time usage of the proposed scheme is lower, the difference to the previously proposed scheme is not significant. The proposed scheme is easier to implement, since the task of keeping track of boundary elements and boundary nodes is not needed. The proposed implementation of the RBIEM is promising and opens up possibilities for efficient implementation in three-dimensional problems. This is currently under investigation.