ITERATIVE SOLUTION OF COUPLED FE/BE DISCRETIZATIONS FOR PLATE-FOUNDATION INTERACTION PROBLEMS

In the present paper, a scheme is developed for the coupled FE/BE analysis of a plate-foundation interaction problem, in which the boundary element equations of the foundation are not explicitly assembled with the finite element equations of the plate, but instead an iterative procedure is proposed to obtain the final coupled solution. This iterative scheme preserves the nature of the BE and FE approaches and the coupled procedure can be easily implemented within an integrated FEMjBEM software environment. The scheme also reduces the computer storage requirement and avoids the error introduced by symmetrization of the BE equations. In addition, some important issues related to the scheme, such as convergence conditions and parameter se!ection, are discussed. A numerical example is provided to illustrate pthe benefits of the scheme. It is noted, however, that the overall performance of the proposed scheme when compared with the conventional direct solution of the unsymmetric equations arising from the explicit coupling of the FE and BE equations, depends on the choice of a free parameter and a matrix contained in the scheme.