A variational principle for the formulation of partitioned structural systems

A continuum-based variational principle is presented for the formulation of the discrete governing equations of partitioned structural systems. This application includes coupled substructures as well as subdomains obtained by mesh decomposition. The present variational principle is derived by a series of modifications of a hybrid functional originally proposed by Atluri for finite element development. The interface is treated by a displacement frame and a localized version of the method of Lagrange multipliers. Interior displacements are decomposed into rigid-body and deformational components to handle floating subdomains. Both static and dynamic versions are considered. An important application of the present principle is the treatment of nonmatching meshes that arise from various sources such as separate discretization of substructures, independent mesh refinement, and global-local analysis. The present principle is compared with that of a globalized version of the multiplier method. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.