An Extended FE Formulation for Elasto-Plastic Materials
Abstract
We present an alternative method for the numerical simulation of elasto-plastic material behaviour. For this extended Finite Element (FE) formulation the history variables, which provide the information of plastic deformations from the previous timesteps, are represented as FE functions. This results in additional degrees of freedom (DOF), and the radial return of the standard formulation is replaced by a fully coupled Newton method for the extended system. Numerical studies, using viscoplastic regularization within a geometrically linear approach prove comparative results and an advantage in calculation time for the extended FE formulation. (© 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)