SMOOTHED FINITE ELEMENTS LARGE DEFORMATION ANALYSIS

Abstract

The smoothed finite element method (SFEM) was developed in order to eliminate certain shortcomings of the finite element method (FEM). SFEM enjoys some of the flexibilities of meshfree methods. One advantage of SFEM is its applicability to modeling large deformations. Due to the absence of volume integration and parametric mapping, issues such as negative volumes and singular Jacobi matrix do not occur. However, despite these advantages, SFEM has never been applied to problems with extreme large deformation. For the first time, we apply SFEM to extreme large deformations. For two numerical problems, we demonstrate the advantages of SFEM over FEM. We also show that SFEM can compete with the flexibility of meshfree methods.