Thesis Presentation

We present an approach to reduce the cost of element internal force and derivative calculations in finite element analyses by precomputing an approximation to the deformation induced stress of an element. By using only instances of a canonical element in deformable meshes, we supplant the evaluation of the constitutive equations with a dimension-reducing shape transformation and an index into a Precomputed Material Table, a piecewise-linear interpolant fit to the deformation response of an element. We discuss approaches to sampling element deformations for training data, and detail our implementation in the form of an adaptive regression tree. We also provide preliminary results for a PMT of a basic material model.

Thesis Committee:
Douglas James, Chair
Jessica Hodgins