AN IMPROVEMENT IN NONLINEAR ANALYSIS

Abstract eng:
When studying the nonlinear behavior of engineering structures, incremental iterative analysis is indispensable. According to the nature of iterative computations their results can never be exact. To control the additional errors, using nonlinearity tolerances is essential. However, because of the limited computers' capabilities small tolerances can not always be applied. Hence almost in all of the well-known analysis softwares, the maximum number of iterations is bounded to an additional parameter. This parameter is generally selected merely by computational practice and engineering judgement, and thus may lead to low accuracy if the selected values are very small, or divergence of iterations if the selected values are very high. To overcome this problem, a technique for automatically controlling the number of iterations is presented in this paper. Based on the number of significant digits that can be considered by computers, this technique not only omits one of the analysis parameters, but also ensures that if computer capabilities allow, nonlinearity residual errors would be as small as requested. The improvement is verified by applying the suggested technique to a nonlinear dynamic problem.

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