TREATMENT OF DISTRIBUTED SOURCES IN THE STOCHASTIC BOUNDARY-ELEMENT METHOD

The contributions of distributed sources to the mathematical expectati ons and variances of the response variables are analysed in the paper using the stochastic boundary element method. The validity and the acc uracy of the particular integral approach in representing statistical properties of the domain are investigated. To this end domain integrat ion techniques to calculate the contributions of the distributed sourc es and their derivatives with respect to random variables that may rep resent both random configuration of the domain and random material par ameter are developed. Several models for the random interior are prese nted and their influence on the response statistics is investigated. T he accuracy of the particular integral approach is demonstrated throug h numerical comparisons with the direct integration formulation.