A new method to the treatment of corners in the BEM

Corner problems frequently occur in boundary element analyses. By adding a virtual node to an element linked at a corner, we formulate the boundary integral equations corresponding to the virtual node to complement the auxiliary equations. Then, variables at virtual nodes are interpolated by the variables of the nodes of element including the virtual node. The proposed method does not use the constitutive relationship and can be easily extended to the situation where material nonlinearity is considered. Several numerical examples demonstrate the validity and accuracy of the proposed method.