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SUMMARY Arterial walls in the healthy physiological regime are characterized by quasi-incompressible, anisotropic, hyperelastic material behavior. Polyconvex material functions representing such materials typically incorporate a penalty function to account for the incompressibility. Unfortunately, the penalty will affect the conditioning of the stiffness matrices. For high penalty parameters, the performance of iterative solvers will degrade, and when direct solvers are used, the quality of the solutions will deteriorate. In this paper, an augmented Lagrange approach is used to cope with the quasi-incompressibility condition. Here, the penalty parameter can be chosen much smaller, and as a consequence, the arising linear systems of equations have better properties. An improved convergence is then observed for the finite element tearing and interconnecting-dual primal domain decomposition method, which is used as an iterative solver. Numerical results for an arterial geometry obtained from ultrasound imaging are presented. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the use of polynomial wavelets as approximation functions in hybrid-mixed stress finite element models applied to the solution of plane elasticity problems. The stress and displacement fields in the domain and the displacements on the static boundary are independently approximated. The kinematic boundary conditions are locally satisfied. All remaining equations are enforced in a weighted residual form so designed as to ensure that the discrete model embodies the relevant properties of continuum systems, namely the static-kinematic duality and elastic reciprocity. A set of numerical applications is presented to illustrate the use of the hybrid-mixed model and to assess its efficiency and accuracy. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The constant γ in the strengthened Cauchy-Buniakowski-Schwarc (CBS) inequality plays a key role in the convergence analysis of the multilevel iterative methods. We consider in this paper the approximation of the two-dimensional elasticity problem by bilinear rectangle finite elements. Two semi-coarsening refinement procedures are studied. We prove for both cases new estimates of the constant γ, uniformly on the Poisson ratio. As a result of the presented analysis we obtain an optimal order algebraic multiLevel iteration (AMLI) method for the case of balanced semi-coarsening mesh refinement. The total computational complexity of the algorithm is proportional to the size of the discrete problem with a proportionality constant independent of the Poisson ratio, that is, the algorithm is of optimal order for almost incompressible elasticity problems. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the symbolic integration of a 4-noded isoparametric finite element for plane elasticity. An efficient approach to generate explicit formulas for computing the elementary stiffness matrix is discussed. The procedure is based on the use of the Derive symbolic manipulation code as well as in a posteriori manipulation of the expressions obtained. The accuracy of the results is tested in extremely distorted and geometrically ill-conditioned elements. Three practical engineering models are presented and the accuracy of the results is discussed. A computer time comparison between both numerical and symbolic integration approaches is also included, showing that relevant CPU savings are obtained when applying symbolic integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]