The boundary element method : errors and gridding for problems with hot spots

Adaptive gridding methods are of fundamental importance both for industry and academia. As one of the computing methods, the Boundary Element Method (BEM) is used to simulate problems whose fundamental solutions are available. The method is usually characterised as constant elements BEM or linear elements BEM depending on the type of interpolation used at the elements. Its popularity is steadily growing because of its advantages over other numerical methods most important of which being that it only involves obtaining data at the boundary and computation of the solution in the domain is merely a case of post processing through the use of an identity. This results in the reduction of the problem dimension by unity. Although there is a reduction in dimension when we use BEM, the method usually results in full matrices which can be expensive to solve. This makes the method costly for problems that require very fine grids like those with hot spots as in the example of impressed current cathodic protection systems (ICCP). The BEM is a global method in nature in that the solution in one node depends on the solutions in all the other nodes of the grid. Hence an error in one node can pollute the solution in all the other nodes. In this thesis, we first focus our attention on defining and studying both the local and global errors for the BEM. This is not a completely new study as the literature suggests, however, our approach is different. We use the basic foundations of the the method to define the errors. Since the method is a global method, first we use the interpolation error on each element to define what we have called a sublocal error. Then using the sublocal error we have defined the local error. Understanding the local errors enabled us study the global error. Theoretical and numerical results show that these errors are second order in grid size for both the constant and linear element cases. Then, having explored errors, we study a method for adaptive grid refinement for the BEM. Rather than using a truly nonuniform grid, we present a method called local defect correction (LDC) that is based on local uniform grid refinement. This method is already developed and documented for other numerical methods such as finite difference and finite volume methods but not for BEM. In the LDC method, the discretization on a composite grid is based on a combination of standard discretizations on several uniform grids with different grid sizes that cover different parts of the domain. At least one grid, the uniform global coarse grid, should cover the entire boundary. The size of the global coarse grid is chosen in agreement with the relatively smooth behaviour of the solution outside the hot spots. Then several uniform local fine grids each of which covers only a (small) part of the boundary are used in the hot spots. The grid sizes of the local grids are chosen in agreement with the behaviour of the continuous solution in that part of the boundary. The LDC method is an iterative process whereby a basic global discretisation is improved by local discretisations defined in subdomains. The update of the coarse grid solution is achieved by adding a defect correction term to the right hand side of the coarse grid problem. At each iteration step, the process yields a discrete approximation of the continuous solution on the corresponding composite grid. We have shown how this discretisation can be achieved for the BEM. We apply the discretisation to an academic example to demonstrate its implementation and later show how to use it for an application as the ICCP system. The results show that it is a cheaper method than solving on a truly composite grid and converges in a single step