A fast multipole boundary element method (FM-BEM) was applied for the analysis of microcracked solids. Both the computational complexity and memory requirement are reduced to O(N), where N is the number of degrees of freedom. The effective elastic moduli of a 2-D solid containing thousands of randomly distributed microcracks were evaluated using the FM-BEM. The results prove that both the differential method and the method proposed by Feng and Yu provide satisfactory estimates to such problems. The effect of a non-uniform distribution of microcracks has been studied using a novel model. The numerical results show that the non-uniform distribution induces a small increase in the global stiffness.

The hybrid boundary node method (HdBNM) combines a modified function with the moving least squares approximation to form a boundary-only truly meshless method. This paper describes two implementations of the HdBNM, the singular hybrid boundary node method (ShBNM) and the regular hybrid boundary node method (RhBNM). The ShBNM and RhBNM were compared with each other, and the parameters that influence their performance were studied in detail. The convergence rates and their applicability to thin structures were also investigated. The ShBNM and RhBNM are found to be very easy to implement and to efficiently obtain numerical solutions to computational mechanics problems.

The fast multipole method was used to solve the traction boundary integral equation for 2-D crack analysis. The use of both multipole and local expansions reduces both the computational complexity and the memory requirement to O(N). The multipole expansion uses a complex Taylor series expansion to reduce the number of multipole moments. The generalized minimum residual method solver (GMRES) was selected as the iterative solver. An improved preconditioner for GMRES was developed which uses less CPU time and less memory. A new initial candidate vector for the iterative solver was developed to further improve the efficiency. The numerical examples apply the method to the analysis of cracks in infinite 2-D space with the largest model having 900000 degrees of freedom.