Agricultural and biological engineering applications of the boundary element method

The boundary element method (BEM) is a powerful and versatile numerical technique. The BEM computes solutions to a wide variety of systems such as those involving stress, heat transfer, wave phenomena where the exact solution is unknown due to system complexity. Agricultural and biological engineering problems are frequently of this type. In order to implement the BEM, only the problem boundary needs to be discretized. A review of BEASY, a BEM modeling system, and its application to selected agricultural and biological engineering problems is presented. Four example problems, one each in these areas: soil and water (movement of water through soil), structures and environment (heat transfer in a biological organism), power and machinery (wind loads on a storage silo), and food process engineering (load response of food materials), have been used to elucidate the BEM implementation. These example problems demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of the BEM as an alternate method (to the established finite element and finite difference methods) for analysis of agricultural and biological engineering problems.