A Galerkin symmetric boundary-element method in elasticity - Formulation and implementation

Both static and kinematic fictitious discontinuities are considered as sources on the boundary of a homogeneous linear elastic body embedded in the unbounded elastic space. A set of algebraic linear equations is generated by modeling the boundary variables and enforcing Betti's equation in a weighted-residual sense. Particular attention is given to reciprocity relations among kernels focusing on the role of singularities; conditions to be satisfied by the boundary field modeling to achieve symmetry of the coefficient matrix; and variational properties of the solution. For 2D problems, a technique based on a complex-variable formalism is proposed to perform double integrations involved in the boundary-element approach.