Distributed computing for the nonlinear analysis of multiphase composites

摘要

Modern digital material approaches for the simulation and visualization of heterogeneous materials allow to investigate the behavior of complex multiphase materials with their physical nonlinear material response at various scales. However, these computational techniques require extensive hardware resources with respect to computing power and main memory to solve numerically large-scale discret-ized models in 3D. Due to a very high number of degrees of freedom, which may rapidly be increased to several 10 million degrees of freedom, the limited hardware resources are to be utilized in a most efficient way to enable an execution of the numerical algorithms in minimal computation time. The computational efficiency and the distribution among available hardware resources (often based on a parallel hardware architecture) can significantly be improved. In the past years, high-performance computing (HPC) based computation techniques were established for the investigation of scientific objectives. Their application results in the modification of existing and the development of new computational methods for the numerical implementation, which enables to take advantage of massively clustered computer hardware resources. Due to the high numerical effort for such simulations, an alternative approach for the nonlinear finite element analysis, based on the sequential linear analysis, was implemented in respect to scalable HPC. The incremental-iterative procedure in finite element analysis (FEA) during the nonlinear step was then replaced by a sequence of linear FE analysis, known in literature as saw-tooth approach. As a result, qualitative (smeared) crack initiation in 3D multiphase specimens has efficiently been simulated.