Volume integration in the hypersingular boundary integral equation

The evaluation of volume integrals that arise in conjunction with a hypersingular boundary integral formulation is considered. In a recent work for the standard (singular) boundary integral equation, the volume term was decomposed into an easily computed boundary integral, plus a remainder volume integral with a modified source function. The key feature of this modified function is that it is everywhere zero on the boundary. In this work it is shown that the same basic approach is successful for the hypersingular equation, despite the stronger singularity in the domain integral. Specifically, the volume term can be directly evaluated without a body-fitted volume mesh, by means of a regular grid of cells that cover the domain. Cells that intersect the boundary are treated by continuously extending the integrand to be zero outside the domain. The method and error results for test problems are presented in terms of the three-dimensional Poisson problem, but the techniques are expected to be generally applicable.