HOW TO DEAL WITH HYPERSINGULAR INTEGRALS IN THE SYMMETRICAL BEM

The symmetric boundary-element method for mixed boundary-value problems is currently gaining increasing interest as it permits the derivation of symmetric matrices. It is even possible to obtain positive-definite finite-element stiffness matrices for BEM subregions, and therefore the method provides a very straightforward coupling to the finite-element method (FEM). The BEM subregions can be handled like FEM substructures in a domain decomposition context. The symmetric BEM uses the full set of integral representations for the 2n types of boundary data for self-adjoint problems of order 2n and solves them in a weighted residual (Galerkin) sense. The main difficulty of the method is caused by the need to compute hypersingular integrals arising from the integral representations of the Neumann boundary data. It is the object of the paper to show that, for 2-D problems on polygonal domains, these hypersingular integrands pose no problem at all, even for higher-order approximations. The present approach makes use of analytical integrations as far as possible. The integrals of the hypersingular expressions are derived completely within the framework of simple engineering mathematics. The problem is reduced to the computation of weakly singular integrals even for C0 continuous approximations.