Parametric Study of the SUR Method for the Simulation of Quasi-Brittle Materials

Abstract

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 unloadingreloading
function to compute an approximate tangent
matrix with an incremental-iterative Newtown type solution
scheme. The smooth unloading-reloading function has two
main parameters p a and ν 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.