Boundary elements in steady convective diffusion problems

AbstractA boundary element method is developed to solve the steady convective diffusion equation in n dimensions. For the formation a transformation into the selfadjoint or symmetric operator is used under a certain assumption, and a boundary integral equation is derived from the Green's second identity. For the discretization of the boundary integral equation, constant or linear boundary elements are employed. A simple model problem is treated in numerical experiments, and a comparison with the finite element methods is given. It is shown that the present boundary element solution is stable with respect to large Peclet numbers and is with the second-order accuracy