SOME REMARKS ON PARTICULAR SOLUTION USED IN BEM FORMULATION

Considerable work has been done by many investigators recently in the use of particular solution collocation methods which effectively repla ce the domain integrals by BEM solutions with modified boundary condit ions. This technique enables us to avoid the domain integral which is the major advantage of BEM formulation. For an arbitrary distributed i nhomogeneous domain term one idea is to choose a series of basis funct ions for which a particular solution can be found without difficulty, and then use these basis functions to interpolate the inhomogeneous te rm. It was pointed out that the success of the proposed particular sol ution method is strongly dependent on the choice of the basis function (Nardini and Brebbia, 1985; Balas and Slideks, 1989). Tang and Brebbi a (1989) compared the radial basis function with Fourier series basis function (Grundemann, 1989) and obtained the same conclusion. We are n ot aware of any mathematical analysis on this topic. In the paper pres ented here, a mathematical error analysis for thermoelasticity is done . The examples show that if there is a domain source distribution or t he problem is a transient thermal conduction problem, the boundary dat a only is not sufficient to define the problem. In this case, the doma in collocation points are very important for correct and accurate solu tions.