Application of lower bound direct method to engineering structures (Q2385504)

A problem of prediction of the long term behavior of engineering structures under arbitrary complex loading is considered. The proposed method combines a finite element method with the specially tailored optimization method. The latter is based on a construction of convex lower bounds, and on application of an interior point method for finding a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker point of the regularized problem. For regularization a DC (difference of convex functions) algorithm is applied. The proposed method was tested using a real world problem. For comparison this problem was solved also by means of the well known Lancelot software. The testing results show the great advantage of the proposed method with respect to the computing time and the required memory space.