Subcycled Hourglass Control for Explicit Time Integration of Dynamic Relaxation Equations

Explicit methods, such as the central difference operator, rely on the economical evaluation of internal forces at each time step of a transient dynamic problem. One-point quadrature applied to the spatial discretization provides the greatest efficiency, but hourglass control is required to eliminate spurious zero energy modes. Computationally practical hourglass control methods involve considerable approximation in evaluating the internal force. Thus, a small additional approximation due to an alternative temporal integration of the hourglass force may not seriously affect the accuracy of the analysis. In particular, the possibility of evaluating the hourglass terms on a larger time interval than the usual stable time step could provide significant efficiencies. The proposed approach of subcycling the hourglass terms is examined in detail with respect to stability and accuracy. Implementation into an explicit finite element program is demonstrated on a three-dimensional example that involves several hourglass modes, and the new method proves to be beneficial for noninertial problems where artificial damping is used.