Scaling integration method for singular integrals and its application to BEM (Q1823633)

The singular integrals in the analyses of the boundary element method (BEM) can often be written as follows \(\int_{S}(g(\theta,\phi)/r^{\beta})dS\) where r, \(\theta\), \(\phi\) are local spherical coordinates, \(0<\beta <2\) and S typically represents the triangular boundary element with one vertex at the origin. It is shown that such integrals can be transformed to line integrals over the side opposite to the origin using an approach called scaling integration. Thus the numerical evaluation of the integrand around the singularity can be avoided. The numerical effectiveness of the proposed method is documented on examples. Finally, a generalization for the case when the origin is not identical with one of the vertices of S is described.