AN OVERVIEW OF RECENT ADVANCES AND EVALUATION OF THE VIRTUAL-PULSE (VIP) TIME-INTEGRAL METHODOLOGY FOR GENERAL STRUCTURAL DYNAMICS PROBLEMS: COMPUTATIONAL ISSUES AND IMPLEMENTATION ASPECTS

An overview of new and recent advances towards a VIrtual-Pulse (VIP) time-integral methodology for general linear/non-linear dynamic systems is presented. Attention is focused on providing a brief overview and an indepth evaluation of the developments, methodology, computational issues and implementation aspects for practical problems. Different from the way we have been looking at the developments encompassing existing direct time-integration type methods and mode superposition techniques, the proposed methodology capitalizes on the computational attributes of both and thereby offers new perspectives and several attractive favourable features in terms of stability and accuracy, storage, and computational costs for a wide variety of inertial dynamic problems. Recently, the authors have shown the theoretical developments via the VIP methodology for transient structural and for transient thermal problems?-ʹ The purpose of the present paper is to summarize the theoretical developments, improve upon the computational/ implementation aspects for general linear/non-linear dynamic structural problems, and demonstrate the pros and cons via numerous illustrative test cases. The theoretical analysis and results of several test cases show that the VIP methodology has improved accuracy/stability characteristics and computational advantages in comparison to the commonly advocated explicit and implicit methods such as the Newmark family. Overall, an analysis of the theoretical developments, algorithmic study, and the implementation and evaluation of the formulations strongly suggest the proposition that the VIP methodology is a viable alternative for general structural dynamic applications encountered in practical engineering problems