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Quadratic NURBS-based discretizations of the Galerkin method suffer from volumetric locking when applied to nearly-incompressible linear elasticity. Volumetric locking causes not only smaller displacements than expected, but also large-amplitude spurious oscillations of normal stresses. Continuous-assumed-strain (CAS) elements have been recently introduced to remove membrane locking in quadratic NURBS-based discretizations of linear plane curved Kirchhoff rods (Casquero et al. in Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 360:112765, 2022). In this work, we propose two generalizations of CAS elements (named CAS1 and CAS2 elements) to overcome volumetric locking in quadratic NURBS-based discretizations of nearly-incompressible linear elasticity. CAS1 elements linearly interpolate the strains at the knots in each direction for the term in the variational form involving the first Lamé parameter while CAS2 elements linearly interpolate the dilatational strains at the knots in each direction. For both element types, a displacement vector with C 1 continuity across element boundaries results in assumed strains with C 0 continuity across element boundaries. In addition, the implementation of the two locking treatments proposed in this work does not require any additional global or element matrix operations such as matrix inversions or matrix multiplications. The locking treatments are applied at the element level and the nonzero pattern of the global stiffness matrix is preserved. The numerical examples solved in this work show that CAS1 and CAS2 elements, using either two or three Gauss–Legrendre quadrature points per direction, are effective locking treatments since they not only result in more accurate displacements for coarse meshes, but also remove the spurious oscillations of normal stresses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continuous‐assumed‐strain (CAS) elements were recently introduced (Casquero and Golestanian. Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng. 2022; 399:115354.) to remove the membrane locking present in quadratic C1$$ {C}^1 $$‐continuous NURBS‐based discretizations of linear plane curved Kirchhoff rods. In this work, we generalize CAS elements to remove shear and membrane locking from quadratic NURBS‐based discretizations of linear plane curved Timoshenko rods. CAS elements are an assumed strain treatment that interpolates the shear and membrane strains at the knots using linear Lagrange polynomials. Consequently, the inter‐element continuity of the shear and membrane strains is maintained. The numerical experiments considered in this work show that CAS elements excise the spurious oscillations in shear and membrane forces caused by shear and membrane locking. Furthermore, when using CAS elements with either full or reduced integration, the convergence of displacements, rotations, and stress resultants is independent of the slenderness ratio up to 104$$ 1{0}^4 $$ while the convergence is highly dependent on the slenderness ratio when using NURBS elements. We apply the locking treatment of CAS elements to quadratic C0$$ {C}^0 $$‐continuous NURBS and the resulting element type is named discontinuous‐assumed‐strain (DAS) elements. Comparisons among CAS and DAS elements show that once locking is properly removed, C1$$ {C}^1 $$ continuity across element boundaries results in higher accuracy than C0$$ {C}^0 $$ continuity across element boundaries. Lastly, CAS elements result in a simple numerical scheme that does not add any significant computational burden in comparison with the locking‐prone NURBS‐based discretization of the Galerkin method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At small scales, the interaction of multicomponent fluids and solids can be dominated by capillary forces giving rise to elastocapillarity. Surface tension may deform or even collapse slender structures and thus, cause important damage in microelectromechanical systems. However, under control, elastocapillarity could be used as a fabrication technique for the design of new materials and structures. Here, we propose a computational model for elastocapillarity that couples nonlinear hyperelastic solids with two-component immiscible fluids described by the Navier-Stokes-Cahn-Hilliard equations. As fluid-structure interaction computational technique, we employ a boundary-fitted approach. For the spatial discretization of the problem we adopt a NURBS-based isogeometric analysis methodology. A strongly-coupled algorithm is proposed for the solution of the problem. The potential of this model is illustrated by solving several numerical examples, including, capillary origami, the static wetting of soft substrates, the deformation of micropillars and the three dimensional wrapping of a liquid droplet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a hybrid variational-collocation, immersed, and fully-implicit formulation for fluid-structure interaction (FSI) using unstructured T-splines. In our immersed methodology, we define an Eulerian mesh on the whole computational domain and a Lagrangian mesh on the solid domain, which moves arbitrarily on top of the Eulerian mesh. Mathematically, the problem reduces to solving three equations, namely, the linear momentum balance, mass conservation, and a condition of kinematic compatibility between the Lagrangian displacement and the Eulerian velocity. We use a weighted residual approach for the linear momentum and mass conservation equations, but we discretize directly the strong form of the kinematic relation, deriving a hybrid variational-collocation method. We use T-splines for both the spatial discretization and the information transfer between the Eulerian mesh and the Lagrangian mesh. T-splines offer us two main advantages against non-uniform rational B-splines: they can be locally refined and they are unstructured. The generalized- α method is used for the time discretization. We validate our formulation with a common FSI benchmark problem achieving excellent agreement with the theoretical solution. An example involving a partially immersed solid is also solved. The numerical examples show how the use of T-junctions and extraordinary nodes results in an accurate, efficient, and flexible method. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]