Boundary Elements – serie

One of the most interesting developments in engineering analysis during the last few years has been the rapid growth of boundary element methods. The first and second international conferences on this topic held in 1978 and 1980 attracted approximately 30 papers each, most of them from a few well known groups around the world. The third meeting in 1981, produced instead approximately 40 papers, many of them from young investigators working in newly created research groups. They have been attracted to boundary elements by the many advantages of the technique and were able to assimilate rapidly, the new ideas unencumbered by previous con­ ceptions. That third conference held in 1981 constituted in many ways a turning point for boundary elements and it indicated for the first time a general awareness of the industry to the research being carried out in the new technique. Engineering firms started to appreciate the advantages of the method mainly from the computa­ tional aided engineering point of view. The advantages of simple data input and output was rapidly understood by those professional engineers who were forced up to them to use cumbersome finite element codes. Boundary element practitioners in close contacts with the industry started to perceive that the method was gather­ ing a critical momentum of its own. This is now more evident by the diversity and quality of the papers in this volume, which are the edited Proceedings of the 4th International Conference, held at the University of Southampton in September 1982.

This book contains the edited versions of most of the papers presented at the 9th International Conference on Boundary Elements held at the University of Stuttgart, Germany from August 31st to September 4th, 1987, which was organized in co-operation with the Computational Mechanics Institute and GAMM (Society for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics). This Conference, as the previous ones, aimed to review the latest developments in technique and theory and point out new advanced future trends. The emphasis of the meeting was on the engineering advances versus mathematical formulations, in an effort to consolidate the basis of many new applications. Recently engineers have proposed different techniques to solve non-linear and time dependent problems and many of these formulations needed a better mathematical understanding. Furthermore, new approximate formulations have been proposed for boundary elements which appeared to work in engineering practice, but did not have a proper theoretical background. The Conference also discussed the engineering applications of the method and concentrated on a link between BEM practitioners, industrial users and researchers working on the latest development of the method. The editors would like to express their appreciation and thanks to Ms. Liz Newman and Mr. H. Schmitz for their unstinting work in the preparation of the Conference.