We review the treatment of trimmed geometries in the context of design, data exchange, and computational simulation. Such models are omnipresent in current engineering modeling and play a key role for the integration of design and analysis. The problems induced by trimming are often underestimated due to the conceptional simplicity of the procedure. In this work, several challenges and pitfalls are described.

An isogeometric boundary element method for problems in elasticity is presented, which is based on an independent approximation for the geometry, traction and displacement field. This enables a flexible choice of refinement strategies, permits an efficient evaluation of geometry related information, a mixed collocation scheme which deals with discontinuous tractions along non-smooth boundaries and a significant reduction of the right hand side of the system of equations for common boundary conditions. All these benefits are achieved without any loss of accuracy compared to conventional isogeometric formulations. The system matrices are approximated by means of hierarchical matrices to reduce the computational complexity for large scale analysis. For the required geometrical bisection of the domain, a strategy for the evaluation of bounding boxes containing the supports of NURBS basis functions is presented. The versatility and accuracy of the proposed methodology is demonstrated by convergence studies showing optimal rates and real world examples in two and three dimensions.

We explore extended B-splines as a stable basis for isogeometric analysis with trimmed parameter spaces. The stabilization is accomplished by an appropriate substitution of Bsplines that may lead to ill-conditioned system matrices. The construction for non-uniform knot vectors is presented. The properties of extended B-splines are examined in the context of interpolation, potential, and linear elasticity problems and excellent results are attained. The analysis is performed by an isogeometric boundary element formulation using collocation. It is argued that extended B-splines provide a flexible and simple stabilization scheme which ideally suits the isogeometric paradigm.

In this work a novel method for the analysis with trimmed CAD surfaces is presented. The method involves an additional mapping step and the attraction stems from its sim- plicity and ease of implementation into existing Finite Element (FEM) or Boundary Element (BEM) software. The method is first verified with classical test examples in structural mechanics. Then two practical applications are presented one using the FEM, the other the BEM, that show the applicability of the method.Comment: 20 pages and 16 figure

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In this work a novel approach is presented for the isogeometric Boundary Element analysis of domains that contain inclusions with different elastic properties than the ones used for computing the fundamental solutions. In addition the inclusion may exhibit inelastic material behavior. In this paper only plane stress/strain problems are considered.In our approach the geometry of the inclusion is described using NURBS basis functions. The advantage over currently used methods is that no discretization into cells is required in order to evaluate the arising volume integrals. The other difference to current approaches is that Kernels of lower singularity are used in the domain term. The implementation is verified on simple finite and infinite domain examples with various boundary conditions. Finally a practical application in geomechanics is presented.

We present a novel isogeometric method, namely the Immersed Boundary-Conformal Method (IBCM), that features a layer of discretization conformal to the boundary while employing a simple background mesh for the remaining domain. In this manner, we leverage the geometric flexibility of the immersed boundary method with the advantages of a conformal discretization, such as intuitive control of mesh resolution around the boundary, higher accuracy per degree of freedom, automatic satisfaction of interface kinematic conditions, and the ability to strongly impose Dirichlet boundary conditions. In the proposed method, starting with a boundary representation of a geometric model, we extrude it to obtain a corresponding conformal layer. Next, a given background B-spline mesh is cut with the conformal layer, leading to two disconnected regions: an exterior region and an interior region. Depending on the problem of interest, one of the two regions is selected to be coupled with the conformal layer through Nitsche’s method. Such a construction involves Boolean operations such as difference and union, which therefore require proper stabilization to deal with arbitrarily cut elements. In this regard, we follow our precedent work called the minimal stabilization method (Antolin et al in SIAM J Sci Comput 43(1):A330–A354, 2021). In the end, we solve several 2D benchmark problems to demonstrate improved accuracy and expected convergence with IBCM. Two applications that involve complex geometries are also studied to show the potential of IBCM, including a spanner model and a fiber-reinforced composite model. Moreover, we demonstrate the effectiveness of IBCM in an application that exhibits boundary-layer phenomena.