Customer Reviews

Programming the Boundary Element Method: An Introduction for Engineers

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am a grduate student. My specific research area is BEM. and I programmed my own c++ code.

If I could get this book earlier, I could have saved a lot of time. By reading this book, reader can find not only detailed information for coding but also clear understanding about BEM.

The impressive points to me are 1) working 2D/3D potential and stress solvable code-there is multi-region version too, excellent explaining about 2)Corner problem, 3)assembly procedure (especially for multi-region problem), 4) programming frieldly math notations, 5) good logical flow of chapters.

The only problem I found is few mistypings. But, it does not prevent me to understand the material.

For engineers in industry, I think they can use the code to solve engineering problem with some modification if they don't have expensive commercial FE package, or use the code to solve linear problems quickly, etc.

As a result, Prof. Beer achieved his goal of writing this book and I hope this book can help to expand the BEM users.

With a bit of knowledge on BEM, I decided to read this book to see if I could learn more, especially on elastomechanics (after reading the 5 star high praise sung by the first reviewer here). The introduction to the method is slow, with discussion on vector algebra, programming, machine precision and things like that in the first few chapters. You see the boundary integral equation (something important in BEM) only after 80 pages (a new learner will probably give up trying to understand what BEM is after so many pages). After that, the narrow focus of the book is on static problems. Maybe it's possible to pick up something on BEM formulation of elasticity, but I doubt it is a good book for new learners of BEM. I would not rate it as high as the first reviewer here: I would consider 3 star a generous rating for the book.