A mesh-insensitive elastic model for simulation of solid bodies

Abstract

FEM-based elasticity models are popular in solid body simulation. To avoid its problems of mesh sensitivity and overly stiff, a novel smoothed pseudo-linear elasticity model is presented. First, the smoothed finite element method is employed to alleviate mesh distortion and overly stiff problems instead of the traditional spatial adaptive smoothing method. Then, we propose a smoothing domain-based stiffness warping technique to compensate the nonlinear errors introduced by linear elasticity models. With this approach, transient displacements are slightly affected by mesh distortion and total volumes are preserved under large rotations. It also shows apparently softening effects in the experiments. Simulation results are generated without adding significant complexity or computational cost to the standard corotational FEM.