A Boundary/Interior Element Discretization Method for the Analysis of Two- and Three-Dimensional Elastic-Plastic Structures

A coupled boundary/interior element method is presented for the analysis of elastic-plastic structures with material models endowed of dual internal variables. The domain field modelling is limited to the only plastic strains and strain-like internal variables, represented by their node values at a set of strain points in each interior element. The formulation, based on a Galerkin-type approach, is variationally consistent and leads to a fully symmetric-definite equation system. The backward difference method is adopted for the step-by-step integration procedure, and each step is addressed by an iterative predictor/corrector solution scheme. The analysis method is expected to be most approp…