Proceedings of the IABEM Symposium held in Pontignano, Italy, May 28-June 3, 1995

During the last two decades the boundary element method has experienced a remarkable evolution. Contemporary concepts and techniques leading to the advancements of capabilities and understanding of the mathematical and computational aspects of the method in mechanics are presented. The special emphasis on theoretical and numerical issues, as well as new formulations and approaches for special and important fields of solid and fluid mechanics are considered. Several important and new mathematical aspects are presented: singularity and hypersingular formulations, regularity, errors and error estimators, adaptive methods, Galerkin formulations, coupling of BEM-FEM and non-deterministic (stochastic and fuzzy) BEM formulations. Novel developments and applications of the boundary element method in various fields of mechanics of solids and fluids are considered: heat conduction, diffusion and radiation, non-linear problems, dynamics and time-depending problems, fracture mechanics, thermoelasticity and poroelasticity, aerodynamics and acoustics, contact problems, biomechanics, optimization and sensitivity analysis problems, ill posed and inverse problems, and identification problems.

Like FEM, the Boundary Element Method (BEM) provides a general numerical tool for the solution of complex engineering problems. In the last decades, the range of its applications has remarkably been enlarged. Therefore dynamic and nonlinear problems can be tackled. However they still demand an explicit expression of a fundamental solution, which is only known in simple cases. In this respect, the present book proposes an alternative BEM-formulation based on the Fourier transform, which can be applied to almost all cases relevant in engineering mechanics. The basic principle is presented for the heat equation. Applications are taken from solid mechanics (e.g. poroelasticity, thermoelasticity). Transient and stationary examples are given as well as linear and nonlinear. Completed with a mathematical and mechanical glossary, the book will serve as a comprehensive text book linking applied mathematics to real world engineering problems.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 11th Conference on Problems and Methods in Mathematical Physics (11th TMP), held in Chemnitz, March 25-28, 1999. The conference was dedicated to the memory of Siegfried Prössdorf, who made important contributions to the theory and numerical analysis of operator equations and their applications in mathematical physics and mechanics. The main part of the book comprises original research papers. The topics are ranging from integral and pseudodifferential equations, boundary value problems, operator theory, boundary element and wavelet methods, approximation theory and inverse problems to various concrete problems and applications in physics and engineering, and reflect Prössdorf's broad spectrum of research activities. The volume also contains articles describing the life and mathematical achievements of Siegfried Prössdorf and includes a list of his publications. The book is addressed to a wide audience in the mathematical and engineering sciences.

This is the first volume of a collection of articles dedicated to V.G Maz'ya on the occasion of his 60th birthday. It contains surveys on his work in different fields of mathematics or on areas to which he made essential contributions. Other articles of this book have their origin in the common work with Maz'ya. V.G Maz'ya is author or co-author of more than 300 scientific works on various fields of functional analysis, function theory, numerical analysis, partial differential equations and their application. The reviews in this book show his enormous productivity and the large variety of his work. The scond volume contains most of the invited lectures of the Conference on Functional Analysis, Partial Differential Equations and Applications held in Rostock in September 1998 in honor of V.G Maz'ya. Here different problems of functional analysis, potential theory, linear and nonlinear partial differential equations, theory of function spaces and numerical analysis are treated. The authors, who are outstanding experts in these fields, present surveys as well as new results.

Boundary element methods relate to a wide range of engineering applications, including fluid flow, fracture analysis, geomechanics, elasticity, and heat transfer. Thus, new results in the field hold great importance not only to researchers in mathematics, but to applied mathematicians, physicists, and engineers. A two-day minisymposium Mathematical Aspects of Boundary Element Methods at the IABEM conference in May 1998 brought together top rate researchers from around the world, including Vladimir Maz’ya, to whom the conference was dedicated. Focusing on the mathematical and numerical analysis of boundary integral operators, this volume presents 25 papers contributed to the symposium. Mathematical Aspects of Boundary Element Methods provides up-to-date research results from the point of view of both mathematics and engineering. The authors detail new results, such as on nonsmooth boundaries, and new methods, including domain decomposition and parallelization, preconditioned iterative techniques, multipole expansions, higher order boundary elements, and approximate approximations. Together they illustrate the connections between the modeling of applied problems, the derivation and analysis of corresponding boundary integral equations, and their efficient numerical solutions.