CONTRACTION OF MULTIPLE SHEAR MECHANISM MODEL FOR LARGE SCALE THREE-DIMENSIONAL FINITE ELEMENT METHOD ANALYSES AND VERIFICATION BETWEEN ORIGINAL AND THE CONTRACTED MODEL

The practical three-dimensional multiple shear mechanism model requires huge memory to store so many parameters of each spring. Thus, this model is not suitable for large-scale analyses under current ordinary computational systems. This study proposes contraction of three-dimensional multiple shear mechanism model which retains the basic concept of the original model, focusing on reduction of the amount of memory consumption in the finite element method. The original model uses many virtual planes which contain many springs in order to consider many mechanical directions in the three-dimensional space. Hence, the original model could have redundancy of springs in some numerical condi-tions. The main purpose of the contracted model is to solve the disadvantage of the original model and the contracted model is mathematically designed in order to make each mechanical direction be expressed by one spring. The contracted model accomplishes to reduce drastically both the amount of memory consumption and execution time in numerical experiments, which examine verification of the contracted model in comparison with the original model.