An automatic adaptive refinement finite element procedure for 2D elastostatic analysis

Abstract

An automatic adaptive refinement procedure for finite element analysis is presented. The procedure is applied to two-dimensional elastostatic problems to obtain solutions of prescribed accuracy. Through the combined use of new mesh generator using contour developed by Lo and the concept of strain energy concentration, high-quality graded finite element meshes are generated. The whole process is fully automatic and no user intervention is required during the successive cycles of the mesh refinements. The Zienkiewicz and Zhu error estimator is found to be effective and has been adopted for the present implementation. In the numerical examples tested, the error estimator gives an accurate error norm estimation and the effectivity index of the estimator converges to a value close to unity.