A novel boundary integral equation method for linear elasticity - Natural boundary integral equation

The boundary integral equation (BIE) of displacement derivatives is put at a disadvantage for the difficulty involved in the evaluation of the hypersingular integrals. In this paper, the operators delta (ij) and epsilon (ij) are used to act on the derivative BIE. The boundary displacements, tractions and displacement derivatives are transformed into a set of new boundary tensors as boundary variables. A new BIE formulation termed natural boundary integral equation (NBIE) is obtained. The NBIE is applied to solving two-dimensional elasticity problems. In the NBIE only the strongly singular integrals are contained. The Cauchy principal value integrals occurring in the NBIE are evaluated. A combination of the NBIE and displacement BIE can be used to directly calculate the boundary stresses. The numerical results of several examples demonstrate the accuracy of the NBIE.