BETECH 85 is a collection of twenty papers forming the proceedings of the first so-called Boundary Element Technology Conference held at the South Australian Institute of Technology, Adelaide, Australia, in November 1985. This conference, according to the editors, arose from ”... a need to arrange a different type of meeting exclusively dedicated to the consolidation of research, development, and applications of the boundary element method.” Speaking of the conference sessions, the editors remark that ”... participants discussed advances in boundary elements which are of direct relevance to practising engineers...”.
Those acquainted with the red-covered, Springer-Verlag, proceedings of the annual boundary element conferences organized by Brebbia since 1978, who might be looking for something different here, alas, will be disappointed. Regardless of the promise for something different as quoted above, BETECH 85 is yet another collection of papers on the Boundary Element Method (BEM), otherwise unrelated, and with no discernible success at being more applied or technological in nature than any other collection.
To be sure, the research represented by these papers is generally quite good. Indeed, this volume contains more than the usual share of work by outstanding BEM researchers. But the volume does not meet its stated objectives.
To comment on some of the individual papers - the first one by G. T. Symm is of interest mainly in that it is an introductory paper on BEM for Laplace’s equation by one who pioneered the whole business almost twenty-five years ago. The paper by J. C. Wu is an informative review article which should be of special interest to workers in fluid mechanics. Two other papers on fluid oscillation and wave motion in fluids, by R. J. Arnold and B. J. Noye, and W. K. Soh, respectively, seem well done. The conclusion in the former paper that the finite difference method may be better on occasion than the BEM is unexpected and refreshing. This reviewer especially likes the paper by V. Kadambi and B. Dorri on how to treat thermal problems with nonlinear material properties by BEM. Also, the paper on floor slabs by J. B. de Paiva and W. S. Venturini is among the most appropriate for the stated purpose of this volume. Most of the other papers, especially the ones by I. C. Mathews, W. T. Ang and D. L. Clements, S. Kobayashi, J. Dominguez, M. Tanaka, and F. Hartmann represent good research and are informative, but in most cases better versions of this research by these authors can be found elsewhere. The same is probably true for the interesting extrusion work by M. B. Bush. Despite the overall quality of the BEM work in this volume, anything significantly different in it, or of more value to the practising engineer than in the regular proceedings, has escaped notice of this reviewer.
More generally, the BEM is a fine method and much good research is continually being done in it by the BETECH 85 participants as well as others. Nevertheless, when the duplication with what appears in regular archival journals and society proceedings is removed, not enough BEM information filling any real need remains under all of the red-covered Brebbia-edited volumes which appear in a given year. The amount of good nonduplicative research being done in BEM simply does not justify the extraordinary proliferation of volumes, by the same editor, devoted to its merits. ”The organizers hope that the BETECH conferences will help to bridge the gap between academic research and industrial applications. The meetings will also help practising engineers to understand how the new technique can be used advantageously to solve their particular problems.” So speak the editors in BETECH 85. This reviewer submits that far too much is made of a supposed ”gap” especially since BETECH 85 does too little to fill a gap of any kind. To continue to imply that the BEM is new and that there is not the right material in existence for the practising engineers, and then to proliferate volumes without much that is really new or different, is of little good to both the academic and the industrial communities. Also, the familiar preachments from the editor about the proper way to view boundary elements are becoming monotonous and dreary to this reviewer.
Future series on BEM for any audience would be far more useful if developed under the scrutiny and standards of a national or international society such as ASME, IUTAM, SIAM, etc.