An element decomposition method with variance strain stabilization

Abstract

An element decomposition method with variance strain stabilization (EDM-VSS) is proposed. In the present EDM-VSS, the quadrilateral element is first divided into four sub-triangular cells, and the local strains in sub-triangular cells are obtained using linear interpolation function. For each quadrilateral element, the strain of the whole quadrilateral is the weighted average value of the local strains, which means only one integration point is adopted to construct the stiffness matrix. The stabilization item of the stiffness matrix is constructed by variance of the local strains, which can eliminate the instability of the one-point integration formulation and largely increase the accuracy of the element. Compared with conventional full integration quadrilateral element, the EDM-VSS achieves more accurate results and expends much lower computational cost. More importantly, as no mapping or coordinate transformation is involved in the present EDM-VSS, the restriction on the conventional quadrilateral elements can be removed and problem domain can be discretized in more flexible ways. To verify the accuracy and stability of the present formulation, a number of numerical examples are studied to demonstrate the efficiency of the present EDM-VSS.