THE USE OF ENRICHED HEXAHEDRAL ELEMENTS WITH BUBBLE FUNCTIONS FOR FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS

Abstract

In this paper, the concept that adds the interior nodes of the Lagrange elements to the serendipity elements is described and a family of enriched elements is presented to improve the accuracy of finite element analysis. By the use of the static condensation technique at the element level, the extra computation time in using these elements can be ignored. Three-dimensional elastic problems are used as examples in this paper. The numerical results show that these enriched elements are more accurate than the traditional serendipity elements. The convergence rate of the enriched elements is the same as the traditional serendipity elements. In the numerical example, the error norm of the first order enriched elements can be reduced when compared with the use of the traditional serendipity element, but the computation time is increased a little. The use of enriched second and third order hexahedral elements does not only improve accuracy, but also saves the computation time for solving the system of equations, when the precondition conjugate gradient method is used to solve the system of equations. The saving of computation time is due to the decrease in the number of iteration for the iteration method.