FINITE-ELEMENT MODELING FOR LIMIT ANALYSIS BY THE ELASTIC COMPENSATION METHOD

The elastic compensation method is a continuum finite element based method for calculating lower bound limit loads by iterative elastic analysis. This paper considers the effects the finite element mesh density, element order and the iterative elastic procedure itself have on the calculated limit loads for a number of sample problems. It is found that the calculated value of lower bound limit load improves with mesh density and higher element order. It is noted that in practice designers are often restricted to working with fairly course meshes (due to computational considerations) and a method for calculating approximate limit loads using fairly coarse meshes is proposed.