NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF ELASTO-PLASTIC LARGE DEFORMATION PROBLEMS USING FEMIEFGM

Abstract

Most of the mechanical and civil systems are flexible multi-body systems, and cars, aircraft, cable bridges, robot manipulators, and satellites are typical examples. Each component of these systems may undergo large deformations (translations and/or rotations). Accurate description and modeling of large deformations has been a very challenging problem in computational mechanics. However, during the past three decades, researchers have successfully developed algorithms to handle large deformations in finite element analysis. But the problems involving geometric or material discontinuities or interfaces can be better dealt with the meshfree methods. The meshless methods are quite attractive for eliminating the mesh related problems due to unavailability of elements. This report gives an introduction to the nonlinear behavior of structures, a detailed review of past developments in the field of large deformation analysis, and an overview of element free Galerkin method (EFGM). The problems involving geometric and material nonlinearities have been solved by EFGM and FEM using total Lagrangian and updated Lagrangian approaches. The nonlinear equations of equilibrium have been solved using Newton-Raphson method. 2-D and 3-D elasto-plastic large deformation problems have been analyzed by both element free Galerkin method and finite element method. The results obtained by meshfree method i.e. EFGM have been compared with those obtained by analytical and/or finite element approach using Ansys. These simulations show that the results obtained by meshfree method are in good agreement with those available in literature and/or FEM.