Comparison of meshfree displacement and stress error recovery of finite element solutions using moving least squares interpolation

Abstract

The moving least square (MLS) interpolation based the recovery procedures have been successfully applied to recover the finite element solution errors in the analysis of elastic plates and pipes problems and can be advantageously applied for large deformation and fracture problems. The study presents the displacement and stress error recovery characteristics in the error estimation analysis employing Moving Least Squares interpolation approach. The study considers quartic spline, cubic spline, and exponential weight function with three different order of basis function in Moving Least Squares interpolation based error recovery analysis. The displacement/stress errors in finite element solution are quantified in energy norm. The cylinder and plate benchmark examples using triangular and quadrilateral elements are analyzed to compare the convergence, effectivity and adaptively improved meshes obtained using the various displacement/stress recovery procedures. The study shows that cubic spline weight function and quadratic basis function found to perform better in MLS based meshfree recovery technique for stress as well as displacement errors recovery of finite element solution. It is observed from the study that increasing the order of basis function will enhance the error estimation quality that is, rate of convergence become faster with improved effectivity of the results. The increase in convergence rate with the increase of the order of basis function is more in displacement recovery technique as compared to stress recovery technique. It is observed in the analysis of benchmark example with linear triangular meshing that the error reduction using meshfree MLS interpolation based displacement and stress recovery is about 10% and 150% respectively for the displacement and stress recovery over the mesh dependent least square based displacement and stress recovery. The study concludes that the effectiveness and efficiency of meshfree displacement/stress error recovery technique strongly depends on the weight and basis functions of MLS method to recover the errors.