On some boundary element methods for the heat equation

Summary The object of this paper is to study some boundary element methods for the heat equation. Two approaches are considered. The first, based on the heat potential, has been studied numerically by previous authors. Here the convergence analysis in one space dimension is presented. In the second approach, the heat equation is first descretized in time and the resulting elliptic problem is put in the boundary formulation. A straight forward implicit method and Crank-Nicolson's method are thus studied. Again convergence in one space dimension is proved.