Stabilization-free virtual element method for finite strain applications

In this paper, a novel higher stabilization-free virtual element method is proposed for compressible hyper-elastic materials in 2D. Different from the most traditional virtual element formulation, the method does not need any stabilization. The main idea is to modify the virtual element space to allow the computation of a higher-order polynomial L2 projection of the gradient. Based on that the stiffness matrix can be obtained directly which greatly simplifies the analysis process, especially for nonlinear problems. Hyper-elastic materials are considered and some benchmark nonlinear problems are solved to verify the capability and accuracy of the stabilization-free virtual element method.