NODE BASED FINITE ELEMENT METHOD WITH HIGH PERFORMANCE ELEMENTS: THE LOCAL ELEMENT METHOD

Recent advances in computer technology have enabled a number of complicated natural phenomena to be accurately simulated, which were ever only analyzable by experiments. Among various computer simulation techniques, the finite element method has been most widely used due to the capability of analyzing an arbitrary domain. The bottleneck of the finite element analysis, however, is the generation of a huge unstructured mesh, for example exceeding 10 million. To overcome the above shortcoming of the standard finite element method, so called mesh-free methods have been studied. The element-free Galerkin method [1] is one of them with the use of integration by background-cells instead of elements, based on the moving least square and diffuse element methods. The reproducing kernel particle method [2] is another mesh-free scheme, which is based on a particle method and wavelets. The general feature of these mesh-free methods is that, contrary to the standard finite element method, the connectivity information between nodes and elements is not required explicitly, since the evaluation of the total stiffness matrix is performed generally by the node-wise calculations instead of the element-wise calculations