ADAPTIVE S-METHOD FOR LINEAR ELASTOSTATICS

A methodology has been developed to simultaneously treat phenomena at several scales. The key features of the method are (i) a detailed erro r diagnosis which identifies critical regions, and (ii) a feedback pro cedure which overlays portions of the finite element mesh, where unacc eptable errors have been identified. by local finite element mesh(es), and then subsequently improves the quality of the solution in the glo bal and local response until the desired level of accuracy is achieved . The method can be routinely used as a global-local method and/or as an adaptive technique which provides a measure of reliability of globa l and local computations. Numerical experiments for problems in homoge neous and heterogeneous (laminated composites) media are presented to validate the present formulation,