Comparison of boundary element and finite element methods in two-dimensional inelastic analysis

The finite element method has been commonly used to solve boundary value problems in inelastic deformation of metallic structures. Recently, Mukherjee and his coworkers applied the boundary element method to such problems. Planar time-dependent inelasticity problems were considered and a constitutive model with state variables was used to describe material behavior. The accuracy and computational efficiency of these two methods are compared for certain selected planar problems. In order to make the comparison as meaningful as possible, in house computer codes developed by the same group at Cornell, are used.