scholarly journals A Brief Review on Polygonal/Polyhedral Finite Element Methods

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Logah Perumal

This paper provides brief review on polygonal/polyhedral finite elements. Various techniques, together with their advantages and disadvantages, are listed. A comparison of various techniques with the recently proposed Virtual Node Polyhedral Element (VPHE) is also provided. This review would help the readers to understand the various techniques used in formation of polygonal/polyhedral finite elements.

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Song Cen ◽  
Ming-Jue Zhou ◽  
Yan Shang

Performances of the conventional finite elements are closely related to the mesh quality. Once distorted elements are used, the accuracy of the numerical results may be very poor, or even the calculations have to stop due to various numerical problems. Recently, the author and his colleagues developed two kinds of finite element methods, named hybrid stress-function (HSF) and improved unsymmetric methods, respectively. The resulting plane element models possess excellent precision in both regular and severely distorted meshes and even perform very well under the situations in which other elements cannot work. So, they are calledshape-freefinite elements since their performances are independent to element shapes. These methods may open new ways for developing novel high-performance finite elements. Here, the thoughts, theories, and formulae of aboveshape-freefinite element methods were introduced, and the possibilities and difficulties for further developments were also discussed.


Author(s):  
Xuehai Wu ◽  
Assimina A. Pelegri

Abstract Material properties of brain white matter (BWM) show high anisotropy due to the complicated internal three-dimensional microstructure and variant interaction between heterogeneous brain-tissue (axon, myelin, and glia). From our previous study, finite element methods were used to merge micro-scale Representative Volume Elements (RVE) with orthotropic frequency domain viscoelasticity to an integral macro-scale BWM. Quantification of the micro-scale RVE with anisotropic frequency domain viscoelasticity is the core challenge in this study. The RVE behavior is expressed by a viscoelastic constitutive material model, in which the frequency-related viscoelastic properties are imparted as storage modulus and loss modulus for the composite comprised of axonal fibers and extracellular glia. Using finite elements to build RVEs with anisotropic frequency domain viscoelastic material properties is computationally very consuming and resource-draining. Additionally, it is very challenging to build every single RVE using finite elements since the architecture of each RVE is arbitrary in an infinite data set. The architecture information encoded in the voxelized location is employed as input data and is consequently incorporated into a deep 3D convolution neural network (CNN) model that cross-references the RVEs’ material properties (output data). The output data (RVEs’ material properties) is calculated in parallel using an in-house developed finite element method, which models RVE samples of axon-myelin-glia composites. This novel combination of the CNN-RVE method achieved a dramatic reduction in the computation time compared with directly using finite element methods currently present in the literature.


2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (08) ◽  
pp. 1665-1699 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianmarco Manzini ◽  
Alessandro Russo ◽  
N. Sukumar

Generalized barycentric coordinates such as Wachspress and mean value coordinates have been used in polygonal and polyhedral finite element methods. Recently, mimetic finite difference schemes were cast within a variational framework, and a consistent and stable finite element method on arbitrary polygonal meshes was devised. The method was coined as the virtual element method (VEM), since it did not require the explicit construction of basis functions. This advance provides a more in-depth understanding of mimetic schemes, and also endows polygonal-based Galerkin methods with greater flexibility than three-node and four-node finite element methods. In the VEM, a projection operator is used to realize the decomposition of the stiffness matrix into two terms: a consistent matrix that is known, and a stability matrix that must be positive semi-definite and which is only required to scale like the consistent matrix. In this paper, we first present an overview of previous developments on conforming polygonal and polyhedral finite elements, and then appeal to the exact decomposition in the VEM to obtain a robust and efficient generalized barycentric coordinate-based Galerkin method on polygonal and polyhedral elements. The consistent matrix of the VEM is adopted, and numerical quadrature with generalized barycentric coordinates is used to compute the stability matrix. This facilitates post-processing of field variables and visualization in the VEM, and on the other hand, provides a means to exactly satisfy the patch test with efficient numerical integration in polygonal and polyhedral finite elements. We present numerical examples that demonstrate the sound accuracy and performance of the proposed method. For Poisson problems in ℝ2and ℝ3, we establish that linearly complete generalized barycentric interpolants deliver optimal rates of convergence in the L2-norm and the H1-seminorm.


2001 ◽  
Vol 09 (03) ◽  
pp. 911-918 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALFREDO BERMÚDEZ ◽  
PABLO GAMALLO ◽  
RODOLFO RODRÍGUEZ

Several finite element methods for the numerical computation of elastoacoustic vibrations are compared. They are applied to two formulations based on different variables to describe the fluid: presssure and displacement potential in one case, and displacements in the other. While the first one is discretized by standard Lagrangean finite elements for both variables, the second one is solved by "face" Raviart-Thomas elements. In each case we consider both tetrahedral and hexahedral meshes. Elastoacoustic eigenmodes have been computed for a test example by means of MATLAB implementations of all these methods. The numerical results allow us to compare all of them in terms of error versus number of degrees of freedom and computing time.


Author(s):  
Selmahan Selim ◽  
Gözde Elver ◽  
Murat Sari

This article concentrates on discovering numerical behavior of the singular two-point boundary value problems through various numerical techniques. This is carried out in a comparative way by mainly using differential quadrature and finite element methods. Also a discussion has been done by means of advantages and disadvantages of the numerical methods of interest.To properly understand the behavior of the physical processes represented by the model equation, the calculated solutions have been discussed in detail. 


Author(s):  
Thanh Xuan Nguyen ◽  
Long Tuan Tran

In the field of structural dynamics, the structural responses in the time domain are of major concern. There already exist many methods proposed previously including widely used direct time integration methods such as ones in the β-Newmark family, Houbolt’s method, and Runge-Kutta method. The time finite element methods (TFEM) that followed the well-posed variational statement for structural dynamics are found to bring about a superior accuracy even with large time steps (element sizes), when compared with the results from methods mentioned above. Some high-order time finite elements were derived with the procedure analogous to the conventional finite element methods. In the formulation of these time finite elements, the shape functions are like the ones for a (spatial) 2-order finite beam. In this article, a simplified variant for the TFEM is proposed where the shape functions similar to the ones for a (spatial) axial bar are used. The accuracy in the obtained results of some numerical examples is found to be comparable with the accuracy in the previous results.


2012 ◽  
Vol 518 ◽  
pp. 95-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sascha Duczek ◽  
Christian Willberg ◽  
David Schmicker ◽  
Ulrich Gabbert

When considering structural health monitoring (SHM) applications efficient and powerful numerical methods are required to predict the behavior of ultrasonic guided waves and to design SHM systems. The existing commercial explicit finite element analysis tools based on standard linear displacement elements quickly reach their limits when applied to ultrasonic waves in thin plates, so called Lamb waves. It is known that the required temporal and spatial resolution causes enormous computational costs. One resort to overcome this problem is the application of special finite elements utilizing higher order polynomial shape functions (p> 2). The current paper is focused on the development of such higher order finite elements and the verification of their accuracy and performance. In the paper we compare and evaluate the capabilities of spectral finite elements,p-version finite elements and isogeometric finite elements. Their advantages and disadvantages with respect to ultrasonic wave propagation problems are discussed and their properties are demonstrated by solving a benchmark problem. Higher order finite elements with varying polynomial degrees in longitudinal and transversal direction (anisotropic ansatz space) are investigated and convergence studies are performed. The results of the convergence studies are summarized and a guideline to estimate the optimal discretization is prepared. If the required accuracy is known, the proposed guideline provides a helpful means to determine both the element size and the polynomial degree template for a given model.


Author(s):  
Michael F. Macri

In this paper, we assess the ability of three interpolation functions in a discretized continuum model to capture and accurately represent the solution. In particular we examine the differences between the partition of unity, moving least squares and finite element methods in the continuum part of the multiscale model.


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