A study on the improvement method of the stress field analysis in a domain composed of dissimilar materials

Abstract

Displacement fields and interface stresses are obtained by modifying the potential energy functional with a penalty function which enforces the continuity of stresses at the interface of two-materials. Based on the displacement field and the interface stresses, a new methodology to generate a continuous stress field over the entire domain including the interface of the dissimilar materials has been proposed by combining the L projection method of stress-smoothing and the Loubignac's iterative method of improving the displacement field. Stress analysis was carried out on two examples which are made of highly dissimilar materials. As a result of the analysis, it is found that the proposed method provides improved continuity of the stress field over the entire domain as well as predicting accurate nodal stresses at the interface. In contrast, the conventional displacement-based finite element method provides significant stress discontinuties at the interfaces. In addition, it was found that the total strain energy evaluated from the improved continuous stress field converge to the exact value as increasing the number of iterations in the proposed method.