Visco-plastic h-adaptive analysis

This paper deals with h-adaptive strategy for two-dimensional dynamic analysis of non-linear materials. The procedure updates the spatial mesh in order to keep or recover an established error level. The overlay model and the Duvaut–Lions flow rule are employed, respectively, in the description of the plastic and of the visco-plastic behaviours. The visco-plastic, elastic and plastic responses are obtained by the same computational code, only changing the imposed value of the viscosity coefficient. Numerical examples illustrate the capacity of the adaptive strategy to recover the actual response, even when the converged solution is completely different from the initial mesh approach.