Development of strain-smoothed polygonal finite elements and alleviation of volumetric locking in the strain-smoothed element method

Abstract

however, further development is still required to use them more effectively in engineering practice. In this study, piecewise linear shape functions are adopted, the SSE method is applied through the triangulation of polygonal elements, and a smoothed strain field is constructed within the element. In addition, volumetric locking occurs when analyzing materials that are close to incompressible. In the case of 3-node triangular element, the lower order of interpolation functions makes it challenging to alleviate the locking. Furthermore, the 3-node strain-smoothed element is also facing difficulties in alleviating volumetric locking. In this study, a new definition of the smoothed volumetric strain at the nodal points is derived from the strains assigned at the integration points, and the volumetric strain field within the element is formed from the nodal smoothed volumetric strains. The strain-smoothed polygonal elements and the strain-smoothed 3-node triangular element with volumetric locking alleviation pass basic tests and show improved convergence behaviors in various numerical problems.

furthermore, it has been shown to improve the performance of finite elements. Polygonal elements enable various applications through flexible mesh handling

Herein, we present effective polygonal finite elements to which the strain-smoothed element (SSE) method is applied. Recently, the SSE method has been developed for conventional triangular and quadrilateral finite elements