A new method of fictitious viscous damping determination for the dynamic relaxation method

This paper develops a new method for calculating the viscous fictitious damping of the dynamic relaxation (DR) method to overcome one of the most crucial difficulties in its application – the low convergence rate. The DR formulation was derived by error minimizations between two successive iterations to deduce an optimum fictitious mass and viscous damping with the aid of the Stodola iterative process. The efficiency of the new method was verified by its application to a wide range of typical structures with strong nonlinearity. The results show that compared to the conventional DR algorithm such as kinetic approach, the new method improves the convergence rate considerably.