Analysis of Heterogeneous Structures of Non-separated Scales on Curved Bridge Nodes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel material-aware shape function approach for analyzing heterogeneous curved bridge structures, significantly improving accuracy and computational efficiency without requiring scale separation.

Contribution

The study develops explicit shape functions based on boundary-to-interior maps that better capture heterogeneity and address inter-element stiffness issues in non-separated scale structures.

Findings

Enhanced analysis accuracy by orders of magnitude

Effective handling of inter-element stiffness and displacement discontinuity

Successful application to large-scale 3D industrial problems

Abstract

Numerically predicting the performance of heterogenous structures without scale separation represents a significant challenge to meet the critical requirements on computational scalability and efficiency -- adopting a mesh fine enough to fully account for the small-scale heterogeneities leads to prohibitive computational costs while simply ignoring these fine heterogeneities tends to drastically over-stiffen the structure's rigidity. This study proposes an approach to construct new material-aware shape (basis) functions per element on a coarse discretization of the structure with respect to each curved bridge nodes (CBNs) defined along the elements' boundaries. Instead of formulating their derivation by solving a nonlinear optimization problem, the shape functions are constructed by building a map from the CBNs to the interior nodes and are ultimately presented in an explicit matrix form as a product of a B\'ezier interpolation transformation and a boundary-interior transformation. The CBN shape function accomodates more flexibility in closely capturing the coarse element's heterogeneity, overcomes the important and challenging issues of inter-element stiffness and displacement discontinuity across interface between coarse elements, and improves the analysis accuracy by orders of magnitude; they also meet the basic geometric properties of shape functions that avoid aphysical analysis results. Extensive numerical examples, including a 3D industrial example of billions of degrees of freedom, are also tested to demonstrate the approach's performance in comparison with results obtained from classical approaches.