Affiliation:
1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA
Abstract
Wave propagation or acoustic emission waves caused by impact load can be simulated using the finite element (FE) method with a refined high-fidelity mesh near the impact location. This paper presents a method to refine a 3D finite element mesh by increasing the polynomial order near the impact location. Transition elements are required for such a refinement operation. Three protocols are defined to implement the transition elements within the low-order FE mesh. Due to the difficulty of formulating shape functions and verification, there are no transition elements beyond order two in the current literature for 3D elements. This paper develops a complete set of transition elements that facilitate the transition from first- to fourth-order Lagrangian elements, which facilitates mesh refinement following the protocols. The shape functions are computed and verified, and the interelement compatibility conditions are checked for each element case. The integration quadratures and shape function derivative matrices are also computed and made readily available for FE users. Finally, two examples are presented to illustrate the applicability of this method.
Funder
Resilient Extra-Terrestrial Habitat Institute
NASA’s Space Technology Research Grants Program
Subject
General Mathematics,Engineering (miscellaneous),Computer Science (miscellaneous)
Reference35 articles.
1. Zienkiewicz, O.C., Taylor, R.L., and Zhu, J.Z. (2013). The Finite Element Method: Its Basis and Fundamentals, Butterworth Heinemann.
2. Bunting, C.F. (2008, January 18–22). Introduction to the finite element method. Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility—EMC 2008, Detroit, MI, USA.
3. Bathe, K.-J. (2006). Discontinuous Finite Element Procedures, Springer.
4. Finite element solution of the Helmholtz equation with high wave number part I: The h-version of the FEM;Ihlenburg;Comput. Math. Appl.,1995
5. Is the pollution effect of the FEM avoidable for the Helmholtz equation considering high wave numbers?;Babuska;SIAM J. Numer. Anal.,1997