THE BOUNDARY CONTOUR METHOD FOR 2-DIMENSIONAL LINEAR ELASTICITY WITH QUADRATIC BOUNDARY ELEMENTS

This paper presents a further development of the Boundary Contour Meth od (BCM) for two-dimensional linear elasticity. The new developments a re: (a) explicit use of the rigid body motion solution to regularize t he BCM and avoid computation of the corner tensor, (b) quadratic bound ary elements compared to linear elements in previous work and (c) eval uation of stresses both inside and on the boundary of a body. This met hod allows boundary stress computations at regular points (i.e. at poi nts where the boundary is locally smooth) inside boundary elements wit hout the need of any special algorithms for the numerical evaluation o f hypersingular integrals. Numerical solutions for illustrative exampl es are compared with analytical ones. The numerical results are unifor mly accurate.