Selective regional refinement procedure for adaptive finite element analysis

Computers and Structures, Pergammon, Vol 68, pp.325-341, 1998

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

Abstract
An alternative approach to carry out adaptive finite element analysis based on the concept of selective refinement is proposed to enhance the computational efficiency of the adaptive refinement procedure. In this approach only elements that are inside some selected refinement regions will be refined, and all remaining elements will be reused for the next cycle of analysis. The definition of the refinement region can simply be determined from the refinement ratios of the elements which are calculated in the conventional adaptive procedures, and hence the suggested technique can easily be incorporated into any conventional adaptive refinement scheme. Numerical experiments show that by refining elements only within the selected zones, significant saving in CPU time is possible in the mesh generation and the error estimation processes. Furthermore, in comparing with the traditional adaptive refinement procedures, the efficiency of the new scheme is enhanced such that equally high rate of convergence and solution accuracy is maintained using similar degrees of freedom, but at a reduced total CPU time.