STRUCTURAL DYNAMIC ANALYSIS BY A TIME-DISCONTINUOUS GALERKIN FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

This paper studies a time-discontinuous Galerkin finite element method for structural dynamic problems, by which both displacements and velocities are approximated as piecewise linear functions in the time domain and may be discontinuous at the discrete time levels. A new iterative solution algorithm which involves only one factorization for each fixed time step size and a few iterations at each step is presented for solving the resulted system of coupled equations. By using the jumps of the displacements and the velocities in the total energy norm as error indicators, an adaptive time-stepping procedure for selecting the proper time step size is described. Numerical examples including both single-DOF and multi-DOF problems are used to illustrate the performance of these algorithms. Comparisons with the exact results and/or the results by the Newmark integration scheme are given. It is shown that the time-discontinuous Galerkin finite element method discussed in this study possesses good accuracy (third order) and stability properties, its numerical implementation is not difficult, and the higher computational cost needed in each time step is compensated by use of a larger time step size