A 2-STEP, 2-FIELD HYBRID METHOD FOR THE STATIC AND DYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF SUBSTRUCTURE PROBLEMS WITH CONFORMING AND NON-CONFORMING INTERFACES

The need for assembling independent finite element substructure soluti ons arises in several engineering and scientific problems including th e design and analysis of complex structural systems, component mode sy nthesis, global/local analysis, adaptive refinement, and parallel proc essing. In this paper, we discuss the solution of such problems by a t wo-field hybrid method where the substructures are jointed with low-or der polynomial or piece-wise polynomial Lagrange multipliers, and pres ent a Rayleigh-Ritz based smoothing procedure for improving the accura cy of the computed coupled solution in the presence of various substru cture heterogeneities. We consider both conforming and nonconforming s ubstructure meshes, and demonstrate the benefits of the proposed two-s tep solution method with several examples from structural mechanics. ( C) 1998 Elsevier Science S.A.