An Advanced Time-Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method For Structural Dynamics

This study presents a novel computational method for implementing the time finite element formulation for the equations of linear structural dynamics. The proposed method adopts the time-discontinuous Galerkin method, in which both the displacement and velocity variables are represented independently by second-order interpolation functions in the time domain. The solution algorithm derived utilizes a predictor/multi-corrector technique that can effectively obtain the solutions for the resulting system of coupled equations. The numerical implementation of the time-discontinuous Galerkin finite element method is verified through several benchmark problems. Numerical results are compared with exact and accepted solutions from previous literature. Since a fifth-order accurate algorithm ensues by using quadratic interpolations for displacement and velocity, numerical results significantly improve in stability and accuracy for structural dynamics problems.