A comparison of integral and differential equation solutions for field problems

Field computation in three dimensions is necessarily expensive. To minimise the cost and increase the reliability of the results it is important to use well behaved formulations. Several integral equation formulations are shown and their conditioning is examined, point matching and weighted residual solutions are compared. Finally the integral methods are compared with finite element solutions of partial differential equations. The applicability of the two approaches is discussed in relation to the development of new computer hardware and costs.