Automatic Remeshing Procedure for Limit Analysis with Unstructured Triangular Mesh

This paper presents a novel remeshing procedure for limit analysis with a more general mesh configuration.The element with high dissipation in each analysis step will be refined through three schemes.A benchmark study of the strip footing problem is first carried out to compare the effect of these three refinements, through which the best refinement approach is concluded.Then, in the collapse analysis of Prestwood Bridge, this best refinement is employed to remesh the elements in the backfill region to test the robustness of the remeshing procedure in the practical scenario.The results show that the proposed remeshing procedure for the limit analysis can effectively reduce the mesh dependence of the prediction.The load prediction significantly decreases after iterative refinements in the two considered case studies.According to the benchmark study of strip footing, the edge-split approach has a prominently good performance among the three considered refinement, giving a precise final prediction with only 8 -15% computational budget of the other two methods.The performance of this approach is also fair when applied to analyzing Prestwood Bridge while the explosion of the time consumption probably appears in the later iterations.