A new partitioning strategy for efficient re‐analysis of large structural systems

Abstract

A computational procedure is presented for the re‐analysis of large unsymmetric structural systems. The procedure is based on a novel partitioning strategy in which the responses of both the original and modified structures are approximated by linear combinations of symmetric and antisymmetric response vectors (or modes), each obtained by using a fraction of the degree of freedom of the finite element model of the structure. The other key elements of the procedure are: (a) lumping of the large number of design variables into a single tracing parameter; (b) operator splitting or restructuring of the governing finite element equations to delineate the symmetric and antisymmetric vectors constituting the responses of the original and modified structures; and (c) a stable and efficient iterative process for generating the response of the modified structure. The re‐analysis procedure is applied to linear static analysis of framed structures. Design modifications consisted of removing members resulting in topologically unsymmetric structures. The potential of the procedure on multiprocessor computers is discussed and its effectiveness is demonstrated by means of two numerical examples.

Citation

Noor, A.K. and Peters, J.M. (1989), "A new partitioning strategy for efficient re‐analysis of large structural systems", Engineering Computations, Vol. 6 No. 4, pp. 303-315. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb023785