Efficient isogeometric Boundary Element simulation of elastic domains containing thin inclusions

This paper is concerned with the Boundary Element simulation of elastic domains that contain thin inclusions that have elastic material properties, which are different to the domain. With thin inclusions we mean inclusions with extreme aspect ratios, i.e. where one dimension is much smaller than the other ones. Examples of this are reinforcements in civil/mechanical engineering or concrete linings in underground construction. The fact that an inclusion has an extreme aspect ratio poses a challenge to the numerical integration of the arising singular integrals and novel approaches are presented to deal with it. Several examples demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed methods and show that the results are in good agreement with analytical and other numerical solutions.