This book constitutes the edited proceedings of the Advanced Studies
Institute on Boundary Element Techniques in Computer Aided Engineering
held at The Institute of Computational Mechanics, Ashurst Lodge,
Southampton, England, from September 19 to 30, 1984. The Institute was
held under the auspices of the newly launched "Double Jump Programme"
which aims to bring together academics and industrial scientists.
Consequently the programme was more industr- ially based than other NATO
ASI meetings, achieving an excellent combination of theoretical and
practical aspects of the newly developed Boundary Element Method. In
recent years engineers have become increasingly interested in the
application of boundary element techniques for'the solution of continuum
mechanics problems. The importance of boundary elements is that it
combines the advantages of boundary integral equations (i.e. reduction
of dimensionality of the problems, possibility of modelling domains
extending to infinity, numerical accura'cy) with the versatility of
finite elements (i.e. modelling of arbitrary curved surfaces). Because
of this the technique has been well received by the engineering and
scientific communities. Another important advantage of boundary elements
stems from its reduction of dimensionality, that is that the technique
requires much less data input than classical finite elements. This makes
the method very well suited for Computer Aided Design and in great part
explains the interest of the engineering profession in the new
technique.
