Stress–Strain Analysis of Thin-Walled Shells with Massive Ribs

A multifrontal method is proposed for solving large-scale finite-element problems with a symmetric stiffness matrix. This approach is based on node ordering rather than element ordering as in the traditional frontal or multifrontal methods. This allows us to employ the efficient well-known ordering techniques such as the minimum-degree algorithm or the nested dissection method. A thin-walled cylindrical shell with massive ribs is considered as an example. The efficiency of the method proposed is illustrated against the classical skyline and aggregation multilevel conjugate-gradient iterative solvers