Isogeometric Boundary Element analysis with elasto-plastic inclusions. Part 1: Plane problems

In this work a novel approach is presented for the isogeometric Boundary Element analysis of domains that contain inclusions with different elastic properties than the ones used for computing the fundamental solutions. In addition the inclusion may exhibit inelastic material behavior. In this paper only plane stress/strain problems are considered. In our approach the geometry of the inclusion is described using NURBS basis functions. The advantage over currently used methods is that no discretization into cells is required in order to evaluate the arising volume integrals. The other difference to current approaches is that Kernels of lower singularity are used in the domain term. The implementation is verified on simple finite and infinite domain examples with various boundary conditions. Finally a practical application in geomechanics is presented. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.