xiv INTRODUCTION TO BOUNDARY METHODS
evaluate nearly singular integrals (Mukherjee et al. [104]), to obtain the hyper-
singular boundary contour method (Phan et al. [131], Mukherjee and Mukherjee
[99]), to obtain the hypersingular boundary node method (Chati et al. [27]), and
for error analysis (Paulino et al. [123], Menon [95], Menon et al. [96], Chati et
al. [27], Paulino and Gray [125]) and adaptivity [28].
An elegant approach of regularizing singular and hypersingular integrals, us-
ing simple solutions, was first proposed by Rudolphi [143]. Several researchers
have used this idea to regularize hypersingular integrals before collocating an
HBIE at a regular boundary point. Examples are Cruse and Richardson [39],
Lutz et al. [89], Poon et al. [138], Mukherjee et al. [110] and Mukherjee [106].
The relationship between finite parts of strongly singular and hypersingular in-
tegrals, and the HBIE, is discussed in [168], [101] and [102]. A lively debate (e.g.
[92], [39]), on smoothness requirements on boundary variables for collocating
an HBIE on the boundary of a body, has apparently been concluded recently
[93]. An alternative way of satisfying this smoothness requirement is the use of
the hypersingular boundary node method (HBNM).
Mesh-Free Methods
Mesh-free (also called meshless) methods [82], that only require points rather
than elements to be specified in the physical domain, have tremendous potential
advantages over methods such as the finite element method (FEM) that require
discretization of a body into elements.
The idea of moving least squares (MLS) interpolants, for curve and surface
fitting, is described in a book by Lancaster and Salkauskas [78]. Nayroles et
al. [117] proposed a coupling of MLS interpolants with Galerkin procedures in
order to solve boundary value problems. They called their method the diffuse
element method (DEM) and applied it to two-dimensional (2-D) problems in
potential theory and linear elasticity.
During the relatively short span of less than a decade, great progress has
been made in solid mechanics applications of mesh-free methods. Mesh-free
methods proposed to date include the element-free Galerkin (EFG) method
[10, 11, 12, 13, 67, 174, 175, 176, 108], the reproducing-kernel particle method
(RKPM) [83, 84],h−pclouds [42, 43, 120], the meshless local Petrov-Galerkin
(MLPG) approach [3], the local boundary integral equation (LBIE) method
[152, 188], the meshless regular local boundary integral equation (MRLBIE)
method [189], the natural element method (NEM) [158, 160], the general-
ized finite element method (GFEM) [157], the extended finite element method
(X-FEM) [97, 41, 159], the method of finite spheres (MFS) [40], the finite
cloud method (FCM) [2], the boundary cloud method (BCLM) [79, 80], the
boundary point interpolation method (BPIM) [82], the boundary-only radial
basis function method (BRBFM) [32] and the boundary node method (BNM)
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