In this paper, transient heat transfer problems are analyzed using the smoothed finite element methods (S-FEMs) with explicit time integration. For a numerical method with spatial discretization, the computational cost per time step in the explicit method is less than that in the implicit method, but the time step is much smaller in the explicit analysis than that in the implicit analysis when the same mesh is used. This is because the stability is of essential importance. This work thus studies the stability of S-FEMs, when applied to transient heat transfer problems. Relationships are established between the critical time steps used in S-FEMs with the maximum eigenvalues of the thermal stiffness (conduction) matrix and mass matrix. It is found that the critical time step relates to the “softness” of the model. For example, node-based smoothed finite element method (NS-FEM) is softer than edge-based smoothed finite element method (ES-FEM), which leads to that the critical time step of NS-FEM is larger than that of ES-FEM. Because computing the eigenvalues and condition numbers of the stiffness matrices is very expensive but valuable for stability analysis, we proposed a concise and effective algorithm to estimate the maximum eigenvalue and condition number. Intensive numerical examples show that our scheme for computing the critical time step can work accurately and stably for the explicit method in FEM and S-FEMs.
Critical time step for a bilinear laminated composite Mindlin shell element.
