Small disturbance potential theory is widely used in solving aerodynamic problems with low Mach numbers, and it plays an important role in engineering design. Concerning structure wind engineering, the body of the structure is in a low velocity wind field, with a low viscosity of air and thin boundary layer, therefore, the tiny shear stress caused by the boundary layer can be ignored, only wind pressure being considered. In this paper, based on small disturbance potential theory, the fluid-structure interaction between the wind and membrane structure is analyzed by joint utilization of the boundary element method (BEM) and finite element method (FEM) through a loose-coupling procedure. However, the boundary of flow field to be calculated is not fully smooth, corners and edges still exist, so the discontinuous boundary element is introduced. Furthermore, because a large scale boundary element equation set with a nonsymmetrical coefficient matrix must be solved, this paper imports a preconditioning GMRES (the generalized minimum residual) iterative algorithm, which takes full advantage of the boundary element method. Several calculation examples have verified the correctness and soundness of the treatments mentioned above.
LI Ya &YE JiHong Key Laboratory of R.C. & P.C. Structures of Ministry of Education, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China
