A line integration method for the treatment of 3D domain integrals and accelerated by the fast multipole method in the BEM

A line integration method (LIM) is proposed to calculate the domain integrals for 3D problems. In the proposed method, the domain integrals are transformed into boundary integrals and only line integrals on straight lines are needed to be computed. A background cell structure is applied to further simplify the line integrals and improve the accuracy. The method creates elements only on the boundary, and the integral lines are created from the boundary elements. The procedure is quite suitable for the boundary element method, and we have applied it to 3D situations. Directly applying the method is time-consuming since the complexity of the computational time is O(NM), where N and M are the numbers of nodes and lines, respectively. To overcome this problem, the fast multipole method is used with the LIM for large-scale computation. The numerical results show that the proposed method is efficient and accurate.