ABSTRACT
In the past few decades, development of finite element methods (FEM) has been accompanied by advances in boundary element methods (BEM). FEM is a domain discretization method, whereas BEM is a boundary discretization method. Both methods have their strengths and weaknesses. FEM is much more flexible for complex structures/domains with high inhomogeneity and nonlinearity, but require intensive computational resources. On the other hand, BEM requires much less computational resources, as discretization of the structure/domain is performed only on the boundary, which leads to a much smaller discretized equation system. BEM, however, is not efficient for inhomogeneous media/ domain and nonlinear problems. Efforts to combine these two methods have been made (see, e.g., Liu et al., 1992) and have achieved remarkable results. Commercial software packages have also been developed (e.g., SYSNOISE) and used for solving a wide range of engineering problems.
