The Boundary Element Method has now become a powerful tool of engineering analysis and is routinely applied for the solution of elastostatics and potential problems. More recently research has concentrated on solving a large variety of non-linear and time dependent applications and in particular the method has been developed for viscous fluid flow problems. This book presents the state of the art on the solution of viscous flow using boundary elements and discusses different current approaches which have been validated by numerical experiments. . Chapter 1 of the book presents a brief review of previous work on viscous flow simulation and in particular gives an up-to-date list of the most important BEM references in the field. Chapter 2 reviews the governing equations for general viscous flow, including compressibility. The authors present a compre hensive treatment of the different cases and their formulation in terms of boundary integral equations. This work has been the result of collaboration between Computational Mechanics Institute of Southampton and Massa chusetts Institute of Technology researchers. Chapter 3 describes the gen eralized formulation for unsteady viscous flow problems developed over many years at Georgia Institute of Technology. This formulation has been extensively applied to solve aer09ynamic problems.

In addition to theory, this study focuses on practical application and computer implementation in a coherent introduction to boundary integrals, boundary element and singularity methods for steady and unsteady flow at zero Reynolds numbers.

In recent years, the performance of digital computers has been improved by the rapid development of electronics at remarkable speed. In addition, substantial research has been carried out in developing numerical analysis techniques. Nowadays, a variety of problems in the engineering and scientific fields can be solved by using not only super computers but also personal computers. After the first book titled "Boundary Element" was published by Brebbia in 1978, the boundary element method (BEM) has been recognized as a powerful numerical technique which has some advantages over the finite difference method (FDM) and finite element method (FEM). A great amount of research has been carried out on the applications of BEM to various problems. The numerical analysis of fluid mechanics and heat transfer problems plays a key role in analysing some phenomena and it has become recognized as a new research field called "Computational Fluid Dynamics". In partic ular, the analysis of viscous flow including thermal convection phenomena is one of the most important problems in engineering fields. The FDM and FEM have been generally .applied to solve these problems because of non singularities of governing equations.

This volume demonstrates that boundary element methods are both elegant and efficient in their application to time dependent time harmonic problems in engineering and therefore worthy of considerable development.

Brings together classical and recent developments on the application of integral equation numerical techniques for the solution of fluid dynamic problems.