Parametric study of the sur method for the simulation of quasi-brittle materials

Abstract EN

In this paper, the authors study the influence the form of the smooth unloading-reloading function on the nonlinear solution characteristics of the recently developed smooth unloading-reloading (SUR) approach for nonlinear finite element simulation of quasi-brittle materials.

The SUR method uses a target function and a smooth unloading-reloading function to compute an approximate tangent matrix with an incremental-iterative Newtown type solution scheme.

The smooth unloading-reloading function has two main parameters a and V which affect the form of the SUR function.

The study is illustrated using different values of the two main parameters of the SUR curve.

A Mathcad code has been written to carry out the nonlinear finite element analysis of the numerical example presented in this paper.