We present a simple, accurate method for computing singular or nearly singular integrals on a smooth, closed surface, such as layer potentials for harmonic functions evaluated at points on or near the surface. The integral is computed with a regularized kernel and corrections are added for regularization and discretization, which are found from analysis near the singular point. The surface integrals are computed from a new quadrature rule using surface points which project onto grid points in coordinate planes. The method does not require coordinate charts on the surface or special treatment of the singularity other than the corrections. The accuracy is about O(h3), where h is the spacing in the background grid, uniformly with respect to the point of evaluation, on or near the surface. Improved accuracy is obtained for points on the surface. The treecode of Duan and Krasny for Ewald summation is used to perform sums. Numerical examples are presented with a variety of surfaces.

The study of vesicles, capsules and red blood cells (RBCs) under flow is a field of active research, belonging to the general problematic of fluid/structure interactions. Here, we are interested in modeling vesicles, capsules and RBCs using a boundary integral formulation, and focus on exact singularity subtractions of the kernel of the integral equations in 3D. In order to increase the precision of singular and near-singular integration, we propose here a refinement procedure in the vicinity of the pole of the Green-Oseen kernel. The refinement is performed homogeneously everywhere on the source surface in order to reuse the additional quadrature nodes when calculating boundary integrals in multiple target points. We also introduce a multi-level look-up algorithm in order to select the additional quadrature nodes in vicinity of the pole of the Green-Oseen kernel. The expected convergence rate of the proposed algorithm is of order while the computational complexity is of order , where N is the number of degrees of freedom used for surface discretization. Several numerical tests are presented to demonstrate the convergence and the efficiency of the method.

The evolution of precipitates in stressed solids is modeled by coupling a quasi-steady diffusion equation and a linear elasticity equation with dynamic boundary conditions. The governing equations are solved numerically using a boundary integral method (BIM). A critical step in applying BIM is to develop fast algorithms to reduce the arithmetic operation count of matrix-vector multiplications. In this paper, we develop a fast adaptive treecode algorithm for the diffusion and elasticity problems in two dimensions (2D). We present a novel source dividing strategy to parallelize the treecode. Numerical results show that the speedup factor is nearly perfect up to a moderate number of processors. This approach of parallelization can be readily implemented in other treecodes using either uniform or non-uniform point distribution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the treecode by computing the long-time evolution of a complicated microstructure in elastic media, which would be extremely difficult with a direct summation method due to CPU time constraint. The treecode speeds up computations dramatically while fulfilling the stringent precision requirement dictated by the spectrally accurate BIM.

Boundary integral methods are naturally suited for the computation of harmonic functions on a region having inclusions or cells with different material properties. However, accuracy deteriorates when the cell boundaries are close to each other. We present a boundary integral method in two dimensions which is specially designed to maintain second order accuracy even if boundaries are arbitrarily close. The method uses a regularization of the integral kernel which admits analytically determined corrections to maintain accuracy. For boundaries with many components we use the fast multipole method for efficient summation. We compute electric potentials on a domain with cells whose conductivity differs from that of the surrounding medium. We first solve an integral equation for a source term on the cell interfaces and then find values of the potential near the interfaces via integrals. Finally we use a Poisson solver to extend the potential to a regular grid covering the entire region. A number of examples are presented. We demonstrate that increased refinement is not needed to maintain accuracy as interfaces become very close.

In this paper, we propose a space-time rescaling scheme for computing the long time evolution of multiple precipitates in an elastically stressed medium. The algorithm is second order accurate in time, spectrally accurate in space and enables one to simulate the evolution of precipitates in a fraction of the time normally used by fixed-frame algorithms. In particular, we extend the algorithm recently developed for single particle by Li et al. (Li, Lowengrub and Leo, J. Comput. Phys., 335 (2007), 554) to the multiple particle case, which involves key differences in the method. Our results show that without elasticity there are successive tip splitting phenomena accompanied by the formation of narrow channels between the precipitates. In presence of applied elastic field, the precipitates form dendrite-like structures with the primary arms aligned in the principal directions of the elastic field. We demonstrate that when the far-field flux decreases with the effective radius of the system, tip-splitting and dendrite formation can be suppressed, as in the one particle case. Depending on the initial position of the precipitates, we further observe that some precipitates grow while others may shrink, even when a positive far field flux is applied.