In structural mechanics, nearly all the current computations for time
dependent nonlinear problems (e.g. plasticity, viscoplasticity or dama
ge) use step-by-step methods. In contrast, for small displacement prob
lems, the large time incremental (LATIN) method, introduced by Ladevez
e [C.r. Acad. Sci. Paris Ser. II 300, 41-44 (1985).], is an iterative
method which accounts for the whole loading process in a single time i
ncrement which is not a priori limited. To give an idea of the step le
ngth, several loading cycles (or even several thousand) can be simulat
ed in a single time increment. The performance of the method is excell
ent in problems with many degrees of freedom or complicated loads [Ph.
Boisse, P. Pussy and P. Ladeveze, Int. J. numer. Meth. Engng 29, 632-
647 (1990); P. Ladeveze, In: New Advances in Computational Structural
Mechanics (Edited by P. Ladeveze and O. C. Zienkiewick), pp. 3-21. Els
evier, Oxford (1992)]. A preliminary extension to large displacement p
roblems has been presented and applied to deep drawing simulation in [
P. Pussy, P. Rougee and P. Vauchez, In: Proc. Numerical Methods in Eng
ineering, pp. 102-109. Elsevier, Oxford (1990)]. The present work conc
erns another extension, suitable for material models with internal var
iables, as described by Ladeveze [C.r. Acad. Sci. Paris Ser. II 309, 1
095-1099 (1989)]; more details concerning this extension can be found
in [P. Ladeveze, Sur une theorie des grandes transformations: modelisa
tion et calcul, Rapport interne du LMT no. 125 (1991)]. The objective
herein is to describe the main ideas of the method, and to show with s
imple beam buckling problems how the pre and post buckling response of
a structure may be obtained simultaneously without any continuation t
echnique and with less than 10 iterations. (C) 1997 Civil-Comp Ltd and
Elsevier Science Ltd.