An improved stress recovery technique for the unfitted finite element analysis of discontinuous gradient fields

Stress analysis is an all-pervasive practice in engineering design. With displacement-based finite element analysis, directly-calculated stress fields are obtained in a post-processing step by computing the gradient of the displacement field—therefore less accurate. In enriched finite element analysis (EFEA), which provides unprecedented...

On tailoring fracture resistance of brittle structures: A level set interface-enriched topology optimization approach

We propose a fully immersed topology optimization procedure to design structures with tailored fracture resistance under linear elastic fracture mechanics assumptions for brittle materials. We use a level set function discretized by radial basis functions to represent the topology and the Interface-enriched Generalized Finite Element Method ...

An engineering perspective to the virtual element method and its interplay with the standard finite element method

In this manuscript we thoroughly study the behavior of the virtual element method (VEM) in the context of two-dimensional linear elasticity problems for an engineering audience versed in standard FEM. Through detailed convergence studies we show the accuracy and the convergence rates recovered by VEM, and we compare them to those obtained by...

An improved stress recovery technique for low-order 3D finite elements

In this paper, we propose a stress recovery procedure for low-order finite elements in 3D. For each finite element, the recovered stress field is obtained by satisfying equilibrium in an average sense and by projecting the directly calculated stress field onto a conveniently chosen space. Compared with existing recovery techniques, the...