A micro-Macro strategy for ship structural analysis with FETI-DP method

Abstract

In the analysis of ship structures at small scale, with structural details heterogeneities and because there is only one prototype produced, which is the final product, the designers rely on finite element simulations. The finite element discretization of such structure, leads to a huge global numerical model, that suffers for computational cost and memory resource that may be unaffordable. In such a case, a multi-scale analysis should be performed. The classical local-global analysis that is used by engineers has several limitations such as: structure details are not periodic, therefore classical homogenization methods are not easily applicable; edge effects are not taken into account; zooming techniques are not easy to use: the gluing they require with the global scale often introduces artificial edge effects. This paper presents a micro-macro strategy based on the domain decomposition FETI-DP method as the solver in analysis of ship structure. With this approach, the two scales (micro and macro) are coupled during the iterations of the solver and we can consider the structural details in areas of interest, area where the fine mesh is used and a sub-domain is located.Performances are discussed and results in term of convergence are presented for several examples.