Efficient numerical strategies for spectral stochastic finite element models

The use of spectral stochastic finite element models results in large systems of equations requiring specialized solution strategies. This paper discusses three different numerical algorithms for solving these large systems of equations. It presents a trade-off of these algorithms in terms of memory usage and computation time. It also shows that the structure of the spectral stochastic stiffness matrix can be exploited to accelerate the solution process, while keeping the memory usage to a minimum.