THE BOUNDARY CONTOUR METHOD FOR 3-DIMENSIONAL LINEAR ELASTICITY

This paper presents a novel variant of the boundary element method, he re called the boundary contour method, applied to three-dimensional pr oblems of linear elasticity. In this work, the surface integrals on bo undary elements of the usual boundary element method are transformed t hrough an application of Stokes' theorem, into line integrals on the b ounding contours of these elements. Thus, in this formulation, only li ne integrals have to be numerically evaluated for three-dimensional el asticity problems-even for curved surface elements of arbitrary shape. Numerical results are presented for some three-dimensional problems, and these are compared against analytical solutions.