31 Mathematik
In recent years, substantial attention has been devoted to thermoelastic multifield problems and their numerical analysis. Thermoelasticity is one of the important categories of multifield problems which deals with the effect of mechanical and thermal disturbances on an elastic body. In other words, thermoelasticity encompasses the phenomena that describe the elastic and thermal behavior of solids and their interactions under thermo-mechanical loadings. Since providing an analytical solution for general coupled thermoelasticity problems is mathematically complicated, the development of alternative numerical solution techniques seems essential.
Due to the nature of numerical analysis methods, presence of error in results is inevitable, therefore in any numerical simulation, the main concern is the accuracy of the approximation. There are different error estimation (EE) methods to assess the overall quality of numerical approximation. In many real-life numerical simulations, not only the overall error, but also the local error or error in a particular quantity of interest is of main interest. The error estimation techniques which are developed to evaluate the error in the quantity of interest are known as “goal-oriented” error estimation (GOEE) methods.
This project, for the first time, investigates the classical a posteriori error estimation and goal-oriented a posteriori error estimation in 2D/3D thermoelasticity problems. Generally, the a posteriori error estimation techniques can be categorized into two major branches of recovery-based and residual-based error estimators. In this research, application of both recovery- and residual-based error estimators in thermoelasticity are studied. Moreover, in order to reduce the error in the quantity of interest efficiently and optimally in 2D and 3D thermoelastic problems, goal-oriented adaptive mesh refinement is performed.
As the first application category, the error estimation in classical Thermoelasticity (CTE) is investigated. In the first step, a rh-adaptive thermo-mechanical formulation based on goal-oriented error estimation is proposed.The developed goal-oriented error estimation relies on different stress recovery techniques, i.e., the superconvergent patch recovery (SPR), L2-projection patch recovery (L2-PR), and weighted superconvergent patch recovery (WSPR). Moreover, a new adaptive refinement strategy (ARS) is presented that minimizes the error in a quantity of interest and refines the discretization such that the error is equally distributed in the refined mesh. The method is validated by numerous numerical examples where an analytical solution or reference solution is available.
After investigating error estimation in classical thermoelasticity and evaluating the quality of presented error estimators, we extended the application of the developed goal-oriented error estimation and the associated adaptive refinement technique to the classical fully coupled dynamic thermoelasticity. In this part, we present an adaptive method for coupled dynamic thermoelasticity problems based on goal-oriented error estimation. We use dimensionless variables in the finite element formulation and for the time integration we employ the acceleration-based Newmark-_ method. In this part, the SPR, L2-PR, and WSPR recovery methods are exploited to estimate the error in the quantity of interest (QoI). By using
adaptive refinement in space, the error in the quantity of interest is minimized. Therefore, the discretization is refined such that the error is equally distributed in the refined mesh. We demonstrate the efficiency of this method by numerous numerical examples.
After studying the recovery-based error estimators, we investigated the residual-based error estimation in thermoelasticity. In the last part of this research, we present a 3D adaptive method for thermoelastic problems based on goal-oriented error estimation where the error is measured with respect to a pointwise quantity of interest. We developed a method for a posteriori error estimation and mesh adaptation based on dual weighted residual (DWR) method relying on the duality principles and consisting of an adjoint problem solution. Here, we consider the application of the derived estimator and mesh refinement to two-/three-dimensional (2D/3D) thermo-mechanical multifield problems. In this study, the goal is considered to be given by singular pointwise functions, such as the point value or point value derivative at a specific point of interest (PoI). An adaptive algorithm has been adopted to refine the mesh to minimize the goal in the quantity of interest.
The mesh adaptivity procedure based on the DWR method is performed by adaptive local h-refinement/coarsening with allowed hanging nodes. According to the proposed DWR method, the error contribution of each element is evaluated. In the refinement process, the contribution of each element to the goal error is considered as the mesh refinement criterion.
In this study, we substantiate the accuracy and performance of this method by several numerical examples with available analytical solutions. Here, 2D and 3D problems under thermo-mechanical loadings are considered as benchmark problems. To show how accurately the derived estimator captures the exact error in the evaluation of the pointwise quantity of interest, in all examples, considering the analytical solutions, the goal error effectivity index as a standard measure of the quality of an estimator is calculated. Moreover, in order to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method and show the optimal behavior of the employed refinement method, the results of different conventional error estimators and refinement techniques (e.g., global uniform refinement, Kelly, and weighted Kelly techniques) are used for comparison.
The purpose of this study is to develop self-contained methods for obtaining smooth meshes which are compatible with isogeometric analysis (IGA). The study contains three main parts. We start by developing a better understanding of shapes and splines through the study of an image-related problem. Then we proceed towards obtaining smooth volumetric meshes of the given voxel-based images. Finally, we treat the smoothness issue on the multi-patch domains with C1 coupling. Following are the highlights of each part.
First, we present a B-spline convolution method for boundary representation of voxel-based images. We adopt the filtering technique to compute the B-spline coefficients and gradients of the images effectively. We then implement the B-spline convolution for developing a non-rigid images registration method. The proposed method is in some sense of “isoparametric”, for which all the computation is done within the B-splines framework. Particularly, updating the images by using B-spline composition promote smooth transformation map between the images. We show the possible medical applications of our method by applying it for registration of brain images.
Secondly, we develop a self-contained volumetric parametrization method based on the B-splines boundary representation. We aim to convert a given voxel-based data to a matching C1 representation with hierarchical cubic splines. The concept of the osculating circle is employed to enhance the geometric approximation, where it is done by a single template and linear transformations (scaling, translations, and rotations) without the need for solving an optimization problem. Moreover, we use the Laplacian smoothing and refinement techniques to avoid irregular meshes and to improve mesh quality. We show with several examples that the method is capable of handling complex 2D and 3D configurations. In particular, we parametrize the 3D Stanford bunny which contains irregular shapes and voids.
Finally, we propose the B´ezier ordinates approach and splines approach for C1 coupling. In the first approach, the new basis functions are defined in terms of the B´ezier Bernstein polynomials. For the second approach, the new basis is defined as a linear combination of C0 basis functions. The methods are not limited to planar or bilinear mappings. They allow the modeling of solutions to fourth order partial differential equations (PDEs) on complex geometric domains, provided that the given patches are G1
continuous. Both methods have their advantages. In particular, the B´ezier approach offer more degree of freedoms, while the spline approach is more computationally efficient. In addition, we proposed partial degree elevation to overcome the C1-locking issue caused by the over constraining of the solution space. We demonstrate the potential of the resulting C1 basis functions for application in IGA which involve fourth order PDEs such as those appearing in Kirchhoff-Love shell models, Cahn-Hilliard phase field application, and biharmonic problems.