Finite Element and Finite Difference Methods

Abstract

Finite element methods (FEM) and finite difference methods (FDM) are numerical procedures for obtaining approximated solutions to boundary-value or initial-value problems. They can be applied to various areas of materials measurement and testing, especially for the characterization of mechanically or thermally loaded specimens or components. (Experimental methods for these fields have been treated in Chapts. 7 and 8.) The principle is to replace an entire continuous domain of a body of interest by a number of subdomains in which the unknown function is represented by simple interpolation functions with unknown coefficients. Thus, the original boundary-value problem with an infinite number of degrees of freedom is converted into a problem with a finite number of degrees of freedom approximately.