A parallel finite element method for the analysis of crystalline solids Original Research Article

A parallel finite element method suitable for the analysis of 3D quasi-static crystal plasticity problems has been developed. The method is based on substructuring of the original mesh into a number of substructures which are treated as isolated finite element models related via the interface conditions. The resulting interface equations are solved using a direct solution method. The method shows a good speedup when increasing the number of processors from 1 to 8 and the effective solution of 3D crystal plasticity problems whose size is much too large for a single work station becomes possible.