An incremental elastic-plastic Finite Element solver in a workstation cluster environment Part I. Formulations and parallel processing Original Research Article

We discuss solution schemes for the incremental elastic-plastic structural problem, discretized by means of the Finite Element method. Attention is focused on their formulation and implementation in a parallel computing environment defined by a cluster of workstations connected by means of a network. The availability of parallel computers allows one to consider possible formulations and solution strategies so far not considered competitive with the classical Newton-like schemes implying the definition of an elastic-plastic tangent stiffness matrix. The solution strategies herein considered are based on the explicit integration of the actual elastic-plastic rate problem. This, in turn, is phrased in terms of two different formulations, whose relative advantages—particularly with respect to their integration in parallel—are discussed. A u̇ − gl (displacemen plastic multiplier) formulation of the structural rate theory of plasticity [1], integrated by means of an explicit, element-by-element scheme, seems to be the most promising one.