Model comparison for inflatables using boundary element techniques

This paper focuses on numerical techniques for inflatable structures where, typically, the structure is a light membrane enclosing an incompressible fluid. Large displacements and subdomains with high aspect ratio are often characteristic of this class of problems, to which the finite-element / boundary-element (FE/BE) paradigm is an auspicious approach for numerical approximation. The FE/BE approach constitutes discretizing the structure with the finite-element method and employing a boundary-integral representation for the fluid problem for discretization with the boundary-element method. A marked advantage of this representation with respect to the conventional partial-differential-equation-based view of finite-element methods for fluids is the bypassing of volumetric meshing, rendering the FE/BE approach an enabling method for simulation of inflatables. The present work compares different structure and fluid models and judges their applicability based on numerical results.