| Abstract: | This paper presents an extension of the computation method for the error in the constitutive relation to include isoparametric elements. Developed over the past few years at ENS Cachan's laboratory, this technique is based on the strict building of admissible displacement and stress fields. This building process, validated for several types of 2‐D and 3‐D straight finite elements (triangles and quadrilaterals, tetrahedra and hexahedra), cannot be extended to isoparametric elements. For such elements, the method consists of seeking an approximation of the statically admissible stress field by solving a high‐degree finite element problem on each element. This technique, as implemented in our error computation code, which is associated both with a method of computing optimal sizes and with meshers able to respect a size map, allows us to optimize 2‐D and 3‐D meshes. Examples demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed method. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
