Isogeometric analysis of boundary integral equations: High-order collocation methods for the singular and hyper-singular equations

Isogeometric analysis is applied to boundary integral equations corresponding to boundary-value problems governed by Laplace’s equation. It is shown that the smoothness of geometric parametrizations central to computer-aided design can be exploited for regularizing integral operators to obtain high-order collocation methods involving superior approximation and numerical integration schemes. The regularization is applicable to both singular and hyper-singular integral equations, and as a result one can formulate the governing integral equations so that the corresponding linear algebraic equations are well-conditioned. It is demonstrated that the proposed approach allows one to compute accurate approximate solutions which optimally converge to the exact ones.