This paper presents a new scheme of time stepping for solving non-linear dy
namic problems. By expanding variables in a discretized time interval, FEM-
based recurrent formulae are derived leading to a self-adaptive algorithm f
or different sizes of time steps. There will be no requirement of iteration
for the non-linear solutions. Numerical validation shows satisfactory resu
lts. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.