An adaptive three-dimensional RHT-splines formulation in linear elasto-statics and elasto-dynamics

An adaptive three-dimensional isogeometric formulation based on rational splines over hierarchical T-meshes (RHT-splines) for problems in elasto-statics and elasto-dynamics is presented. RHT-splines avoid some short-comings of NURBS-based formulations; in particular they allow for adaptive h-refinement with ease. In order to drive the adaptive refinement, we present a recovery-based error estimator for RHT-splines. The method is applied to several problems in elasto-statics and elasto-dynamics including three-dimensional modeling of thin structures. The results are compared to analytical solutions and results of NURBS based isogeometric formulations.