Abstract
Application of the fast multipole boundary element method (FMBEM) to corrosion problems is studied. It is found that this method can be successfully applied to corrosion analysis by employing the previous research results on the potential problems together with the following procedures; (1) use of M00 of the root cell (which is obtained in the process of multipole expansion) for the infinite region problems, and (2) modification of the residual calculation formula in the Bi-CGSTAB iterative method to cope with the nonlinearity caused by polarization curves. A pipe element which is suitable to the FMBEM is also developed to increase the efficiency of calculation for pipelines. A few examples are shown to demonstrate the applicability of the FMBEM to corrosion problems.
