Boundary Element Methods for Engineers:

Part I: Potential Problems

Constant Boundary Element Program for Potential Problems

The subprogram stores the co-ordinates of the first and last element end points on the current segment and
then defines the element end point co-ordinates, storing in XEEND and YEEND. Note that the segment
number associated with a particular element end point is stored temporarily in array ISEGEND. Once
the element data have been generated this information is transferred from ISEGEND to ISEGELEM,
the segment number associated with each element. This information will be required later in the final
output of results, when the segment number for each element is required for calculating potential flows
across the various segments.
For a straight segment, simple linear interpolation is applied to define the element end points. If 1 and
2 (XFIRST and XLAST) are the global co-ordinates of the first and last segment end points, (M) is

the element counter (from 1 to the number of elements on the segment) and ( NELSEG) is the number
of elements on the segment, then the co-ordinate of the second end of the th element is given by
= 1 +

(2 1 ) (3.1)

and similarly for the co-ordinate. The position of the first end point on the segment has already been
defined as that of the last point of the previous segment, except for the first end point on each boundary,
which was defined initially for the boundary. If the distribution of element end points along the segment
is not uniform, but has a constant ratio between the lengths of successive elements (RATSEG in the

subprogram), then a different formula is required. Let be the component in the direction of the
length of the first element, then

2 1 = ( 1 + + 2 + 3 + . . . . . + 1 ) (3.2)

Multiply through by
(2 1 ) = ( + 2 + 3 + 4 . . . . . + )

and subtracting
(1 )(2 1 ) = ( 1 () 3.3)

from which
=

(1)( 2 1 )
(1 )

(3.4)

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