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The Use of Curved Elements in The Finite Element A PDF
The Use of Curved Elements in The Finite Element A PDF
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Christos Xenophontos
University of Cyprus
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All content following this page was uploaded by Christos Xenophontos on 06 June 2014.
Received September 29, 2004; accepted (in revised form) February 20, 2005; Published online December 23, 2005
465
0885-7474/06/0600-0465/0 © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.
466 Xenophontos
D
− φ = 0,
· φ − Gκt −2 ∇w
− φ + (1 + ν)∇∇
(1 − ν)∆ (1)
2
−Gκt −2 ∇ · ∇w − φ = g, (2)
∇w
− φ = 0. (3)
and analyzed in the context of the hp version in [9]. In this article we investi-
gate an extension of this method which includes curved elements, and verify
that the (original) definition of the hp MITC elements from [9] indeed works
in practice when one deals with curvilinear domains.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: in Sec. 2 we present the
discretization of the R–M equations by the standard formulation. Section 3
presents an hp MITC method for curved elements and Sec. 4 contains the
results of numerical computations for a model problem. Our conclusions
are presented in Sec. 5. In what follows, the usual notation H k (Ω) will be
used for spaces containing functions on the domain Ω ⊂ R2 with boundary
∂Ω smooth, having k generalized derivatives in L2 (Ω). The norm on H k (Ω)
will be denoted by · k,Ω . Finally, the condensed notation
w)2
(φ, 2 + w2 = φ1 2 + φ2 2 + w2 ,
= φ
r,s,Ω r,Ω s,Ω r,Ω r,Ω s,Ω
for all (θ, ζ ) ∈ VN (Ω) × WN (Ω). The global spaces VN (Ω) and WN (Ω)
are constructed by first partitioning the domain Ω into a mesh M of
curvilinear quadrilateral and/or triangular elements Ωk , each of which is
the image of a reference element Ω under an invertible element map-
ping Fk : Ω → Ωk . The reference element Ω is chosen as either the unit
square S = [−1, 1] or the reference triangle T = {(ξ, η) ∈ [0, 1]2 : η 1 − ξ }.
2
Then the global spaces VN (Ω), WN (Ω) are defined piecewise in the follow-
ing way: polynomial spaces V and W
p1 (Ω) are chosen on the refer-
p2 (Ω)
ence elements Ω = S or T , among Qp,q (Ω) = span{ξ i ηj : 0 i p, 0 j
= Qp,p (Ω),
q}, Qp (Ω) or Pp (Ω) = span{ξ i ηj : 0 i + j p}. The reference
spaces are then mapped onto each element to create the spaces
Vp1 (Ωk ) = φp = φ
◦ F −1 : φ
k
∈ V ,
p1 (Ω) (7)
Wp2 (Ωk ) = wq = w ◦ Fk−1 : w
∈W .
p2 (Ω) (8)
q , with V
mial, i.e. Fk ∈ V q = Qq Ω or Pq Ω , then there exists a con-
stant C ∈ R independent of t, p and α, such that
Use of Curved Elements in the Finite Element Approximation of Thin Plates 469
where
q = Qq Ω
3q − 2 for V
α=
, (12)
3q − 4 for Vq = Pq Ω
−
→
with uN = φN , wN ∈ [V p (Ωk )]2 × V p+q (Ωk ) denoting the solution to (6).
Practically, the above result describes the amount of pre-asymptotic locking
and, in addition, shows that indeed the method is free of locking as p → ∞,
even when certain curved elements are used for the discretization. (See [6]
for more details, including a more “practical” version of this result).
However, standard methods do not yield satisfactory results when the
moment and/or stress resultants are of interest. In [7] this problem was
somewhat alleviated through the use of the p version FEM along with a
post-processing scheme for computing the resultants, equivalent to using
the equilibrium (as opposed to the constitutive) equation. This will be
illustrated in the numerical results of Sec. 4 ahead.
1 The term stable means that the spaces satisfy the inf-sup condition.
470 Xenophontos
where Sk = Fk (
S) and Jk−T is the inverse transpose of the derivative of the
element mapping Fk . Finally, the global space VN is defined by
Sk ∈ Vp (Sk ), ∀Sk ∈ M
VN = φ ∈ [H01 (Ω)]2 : φ|
The resulting discrete problem is: find (φN , wN ) ∈ VN (Ω) × WN (Ω)
such that
D
ΠN φN , wN ; Π N θ,
a(φN , θ) + Gκt −2 b(Π ζ)= gζ dA (13)
2 Ω
for all (θ, ζ ) ∈ VN (Ω) × WN (Ω). (For implentational details see [5].)
Use of Curved Elements in the Finite Element Approximation of Thin Plates 471
4. NUMERICAL EXAMPLE
In this section we present the results of numerical computations for a
model problem with a known exact solution [2]; for additional numerical
results see [13]. The results presented here are for a soft-simply-supported,2
unit circular plate, with Young’s modulus E = 1, Poisson ratio ν = 0.3, shear
correction factor κ = 1, and transverse load density given in polar coordi-
nates by g(r, θ ) = cos(θ ). The mesh is shown in Fig. 1 and it includes thin
elements of width pt along the boundary of the domain in order for the
boundary layer to be uniformly approximated [8]. Here p is the degree of
the approximating polynomial, which is increased from p = 1 to p = 8 for our
computations, and t is the plate thickness which was chosen as t = 10−j , j =
2, 3—other choices for t yield similar results. We note that no approxima-
tion to the boundary of the plate is made, but rather the curved elements
are mapped exactly, using the blending map technique (cf. [12], pp. 107–108)
to construct the element mappings Fk .
2 Forthis choice of boundary conditions the boundary layer is strong, hence we are truly test-
ing the methods under consideration.
472 Xenophontos
D
w)2E =
(φ, φ)
a(φ, w; φ,
+ Gκt −2 b(φ, w) (14)
2
= −Gκt −2 (∇w
Q −Π
ΠN φ), (15)
while for the standard formulation the shear force will be computed using
the constitutive equation (4), as well as the equilibrium equation, which
basically amounts to a post-processing scheme—the computations for this
last case were performed using the commercial finite element code Stress-
Check (E.S.R.D., St. Louis, MO). Since Q ∈/ L2 (Ω) as t → 0, one can-
not expect pointwise approximations to have any accuracy uniformly in
t, especially near the boundary. For this reason we will compute Q suffi-
ciently away from the boundary; in particular we will be measuring the
first component of the shear force Qx (x, 0) for 0 x 1 − pt, with p = 8
(the highest polynomial degree).
Figure 2 shows the error measured in the energy norm, as computed
by both the standard and MITC formulations. As this figure indicates,
both methods perform well, independently of the thickness t, and near
exponential convergence rates are observed, with the relative error being
reduced down to 1%.
Figure 3 shows the shear force distribution, as well as the error in
the shear force, for the standard formulation (with and without post-pro-
cessing) and for the MITC formulation. First, we note that for t = 0.01
most of the error comes from the interior of the plate where the num-
ber of elements is minimal—this would not be the case if more elements
were used. Second, we confirm that the standard formulation performs
very poorly unless post-processing is used; in this case the standard FEM
performs as well as the MITC method, even in the presence of curved
elements.
To compare the latter two approaches, we show in Fig. 4 the percent-
age relative pointwise error in the shear force at the point (0, 0), for t =
0.01 (for other values of t the results were almost identical). We see that
both methods converge at a near exponential rate, with the MITC formu-
lation having a slight advantage.
Use of Curved Elements in the Finite Element Approximation of Thin Plates 473
2
Soft-Simply-Supported plate, t=0.01
10
Standard Method
Percentage Relative Error in Energy Norm
hp-MITC Method
1
10
0
10
-1
10
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500
Degrees of Freedom, N
hp-MITC Method
1
10
0
10
-1
10
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500
Degrees of Freedom, N
Fig. 2. Energy norm convergence, t = 0.01, 0.001.
474 Xenophontos
0.1
0
-0.1
-0.2
0.05
|Qx(x,0)-QxFEM(x,0)|
Stand. FEM
Stand. FEM w/ post-processing
0.04 hp-MITC
0.03
0.02
0.01
0
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9
x
0.2
Qx(x,0)
Exact
-0.2 Stand. FEM
Stand. FEM w/ post-processing
hp-MITC
-0.4
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9
x
Stand. FEM
|Qx(x,0)-QxFEM(x,0)|
0.05
0
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9
x
2
10
1
10
0
10
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Polynomial degree p
Fig. 4. Convergence of the shear force at (0,0) for t = 0.01.
5. CONCLUSIONS
We studied the approximation of the R–M plate model by the p/ hp
FEM, and commented on the performance of the standard and MITC for-
mulations in the presence of curved elements. The latter formulation, origi-
nally defined in [9], was implemented using the ideas of [4] on how to handle
curved elements using mixed formulations. We conclude that when the error
in the energy norm is used as an error measure, both formulations perform
well, assuming the appropriate mesh design is used to capture the bound-
ary layers. When quantities of engineering interest, such as the shear force,
are computed, the standard formulation fails to produce good results unless
some kind of post-processing is used, in which case its performance is signifi-
cantly improved and becomes comparable to that of the MITC formulation
(with the latter having a slight advantage).
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476 Xenophontos
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