Authors
Abstract
The boundary element method (BEM) has become one of the most powerful
numerical techniques which has already established itself within the scientific
community. The most striking feature of this technique is that, in principle, only the
boundaries of the region being investigated have to be discretized, which therefore
leads to many fewer discrete elements than any scheme requiring internal subdivision
of the whole body. This means that the number of unknowns is reduced dramatically,
especially for 3D problems, as the unknowns occurred only on the boundary of the
problem.
This paper is devoted to make use of the boundary element method (BEM) as a
practical problem solving tool to analyze a soil - structure interaction problem. The
program (MRBEM) is adopted in this study for the analysis process. It is a general
purpose boundary element method program for solving elasticity and potential
problems with multiple regions. This program is written by FORTRN-90 language and
developed during this study to solve a three dimensional problem represented by a
group of piles. The results were compared with those findings in some experimental
and theoretical researches and good agreements were obtained.
It was found that when using the BEM in the analysis, the stresses and
displacements need only to be calculated where the details of interest occur on the
boundary or are localized to a particular part of the domain, and hence an entire
domain solution is not required. Moreover, boundary conditions at infinity can be
modeled exactly without the need to extend the region a long distance away or to apply
artificial boundary conditions as a result to the arbitrary truncation of the outer region.
Keywords
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