A novel alpha finite element method (alpha FEM) for exact solution to mechanics problems using triangular and tetrahedral elements

The paper presents an alpha finite element method (alpha FEM) for computing nearly exact solution in energy norm for mechanics problems using meshes that can be generated automatically for arbitrarily complicated domains. Three-node triangular (alpha FEM-T3) and four-node tetrahedral (alpha FEM-T4) elements with a scale factor alpha are formulated for two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) problems, respectively. The essential idea of the method is the use of a scale factor alpha is an element of [0,1] to obtain a combined model of the standard fully compatible model of the FEM and a quasi-equilibrium model of the node-based smoothed FEM (N-SFEM). This novel combination of the FEM and N-SFEM makes the best use of the upper bound property of the N-SFEM and the lower bound property of the standard FEM. Using meshes with the same aspect ratio, a unified approach has been proposed to obtain a nearly exact solution in strain energy for linear problems. The proposed elements are also applied to improve the accuracy of the solution of nonlinear problems of large deformation. Numerical results for 2D (using alpha FEM-T3) and 3D (using alpha FEM-T4) problems confirm that the present method gives the much more accurate solution comparing to both the standard FEM and the N-SFEM with the same number of degrees of freedom and similar computational efforts for both linear and nonlinear problems. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.