Adaptive meshing for dynamic strain localization Original Research Article

A mesh enrichment procedure is developed to capture the shear band for strain localization in elasto-(visco)-plastic solids. The enriched mesh comprises four and five noded quadrilateral elements which can be adaptively refined in the localized zone. The criterion for mesh adaption combines three well-known localization characteristics to predict the onset of localization in individual elements. A modified procedure for transferring state variables between two successive refined meshes is proposed. The procedure is tested by solving several sample problems. Consistent and stable solutions are obtained. In particular, shear band widths and plastic strains are found to converge to stable values. The results are compared with solutions using the enriched displacement procedure defined in [1]. The efficiency of the global adaptive scheme is tested on initial- and boundary-value problems that involve different material properties and geometries.