BOUNDARY-ELEMENT DISCRETIZATION OF PLANE ELASTICITY AND PLATE-BENDING PROBLEMS

The paper deals with the discretization of the integral equations arising in the boundary formulation of plane elasticity and plate bending problems. Particular attention is paid to the efficiency of the interpolation used in approximating the boundary quantities and to the precision and computational convenience in evaluating the boundary integrals. The proposed discretization model is based on the use of a quadratic B-spline approximation to represent the boundary variables and on the results from the analytical integration to compute the boundary coefficients. The advantages are those of accuracy and the saving of computer time. Some numerical results allow an analysis of the performance of the model.