Development of SFEM-Pre: A Novel Preprocessor for Model Creation for the Smoothed Finite Element Method

Abstract

Smoothed finite element method (S-FEM) is a new general numerical method which has been applied to solve various practical engineering problems. It combines standard finite element method (FEM) and meshfree techniques based on the weaken-weak (W2) formulation. This project, for the first time, develops a preprocessor software package SFEM-Pre for creating types of two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) S-FEM models following strictly the S-FEM theory. Because the software architecture of our 3D processor is the same as our 2D preprocessor, we will mainly introduce the 2D preprocessor in terms of software design for easier description, but the examples will include both 2D and 3D cases to fully demonstrate and validate the whole preprocessor of S-FEM. Our 2D preprocessor package is equipped with a graphical user interface (GUI) for easy use, and with a connectivity database for efficient computation. Schemes are developed for not only automatically meshes the problem domains using our GUI, but also accepts various geometry files made available from some existing commercial software packages, such as ABAQUS®and HyperMesh®. In order to improve the efficiency of our preprocessor, a parallel triangulation mesh generator has also been developed based on the advancing front technique (AFT) to create triangular meshes for complex geometry, and at the same time to create six types of connectivity needed for various S-FEM models. In addition, a database is implemented in our code to record all these connectivity to avoid duplicated calculation. Finally, intensive numerical experiments are conducted to validate the efficiency, accuracy and stability of our preprocessor codes. It is shown that with our preprocessor, an S-FEM can be created automatically without much human intervention for geometry of arbitrary complexity.