Boundary Element Methods in Transport Phenomena (Computational Engineering)

Boundary Element Methods (BEM) have gained widespread acceptance in the areas of engineering analysis related to potential problems and elasticity. These techniques are also being used increasingly for the analysis of heat and mass transfer problems and more recently in flow analysis or momentum transport. The advantages of the method, such as the reduction of dimensionality for linear differential equations, ease of coding and smaller memory requirements and its high level of accuracy and computational efficiency, will ensure that its use will become more and more common. Until now coverage of the method's use in transport phenomena has been confined to journals and multi-editor works and textbook coverage has not been available. The purpose of this book is to provide a monograph to fill this gap. It aims to provide a thorough understanding of the fundamentals of the method and its capability in solving a wide range of transport phenomena problems, especially in heat and mass transfer. The book can be used as a stand alone text for a short BEM course or as a supplement to the more traditional transport phenomena texts in a conventional course to reinforce the numerical aspects of the subject. It can also be used as a self study tool for researchers involved in engineering analysis. Examples are provided throughout the text to illustrate the ideas and solutions.