Enhanced Floating Isogeometric Analysis

The numerical simulation of additive manufacturing techniques promises the acceleration of costly experimental procedures to identify suitable process parameters. We recently proposed Floating Isogeometric Analysis (FLIGA), a new computational solid mechanics approach, which is mesh distortion-free in one characteristic spatial direction. FLIGA emanates from Isogeometric Analysis and its key novel aspect is the concept of deformation-dependent “floating” of individual B-spline basis functions along one parametric axis of the mesh. Our previous work showed that FLIGA not only overcomes the problem of mesh distortion associated to this direction, but is also ideally compatible with material point integration and enjoys a stability similar to that of conventional Lagrangian mesh-based methods. These features make the method applicable to the simulation of large deformation problems with history-dependent constitutive behavior, such as additive manufacturing based on polymer extrusion. In this work, we enhance the first version of FLIGA by (i) a novel quadrature scheme which further improves the robustness against mesh distortion, (ii) a procedure to automatically regulate floating of the basis functions (as opposed to the manual procedure of the first version), and (iii) an adaptive refinement strategy. We demonstrate the performance of enhanced FLIGA on relevant numerical examples including a selection of viscoelastic extrusion problems.