Spherical polar coordinate transformation for integration of singular functions on tetrahedra

A method is presented for the evaluation of integrals on tetrahedra where the integrand has a singularity at one vertex. The approach uses a transformation to spherical polar coordinates which explicitly eliminates the singularity and facilitates the evaluation of integration limits. The method can also be implemented in an adaptive form which gives convergence to a required tolerance. Results from the method are compared to the output from an exact analytical method and show high accuracy. In particular, when the adaptive algorithm is used, highly accurate results are found for poorly conditioned tetrahedra which normally present difficulties for numerical quadrature techniques.