Elasto-Plastic Stress Analysis by Boundary Element Method

The finite element method (FEM) is one of the most important and useful methods of the numerical analyses in the all fields of the engineering problems as well as structural analyses by using the large capacity of computers. On the other hand, integral equation technique have been considered to be a different type of analytical methodtthrough the works of Russian authors, such as Muskhelishvili, Miklim, et al. The work at the Southampton University group culminated in the first book in 1978 for which the title ”Boundary Element Method (BEM)” was used. BEM was demonstrated in linear elastic problems by Brebbia and more recently the work of BEM was extended to elasto-plastic problems. However, the accuracy of BEM calculation for elasto-plastic problems has not yet been clarified perfectly. This investigation presented the formulation of elasto-plastic boundary element analysis by divergence's theorem. The issue of accuracy of the solutions calculated by the BEM programs was discussed for uni-axial tension and contact problems in the range of elastic and elasto-plastic problems, respectively.