A NATURAL METHOD FOR THE TREATMENT OF FLO ATING POTENTIALS ASSOCIATEDWITH THE FINITE-ELEMENT METHOD

An efficient method for the treatment of floating potentials, associat ed with the finite element method and applied to the electrostatic pro blem, is presented. In addition, this method leads to a technique for the evaluation of the electric charge, which is based on an average co mputation in perfect accordance with the discretized weak formulation of the problem. The general method offers the advantage of considering directly the total electric charges of fixed or floating potential co nductors, while keeping a symmetrical matrix for the system, which all ows an easy coupling between charges and potentials as well for the fo rmulation as for the solving. Therefore, it can deal with any electros tatic problem without the need for any intermediate computational proc edure, e.g. differentiation.