| Abstract: | This paper corrects an impression, created by a recent contribution to the International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics, that the mathematical equivalence of the direct and indirect boundary element methods for the diffusion equation implies that their respective computational needs with regard to the body integral terms are equal. It is shown that in a stepwise implementation of the numerical procedure for solving a finite body problem, indirect methods requirean integration over an infinite region and not merely over the body as is the case for the direct version. |
