An application of the arc length method involving concrete cracking

To overcome numerical difficulties in highly non-linear materials Crisfield6 proposed a solution procedure involving the use of a constant arc length solution scheme with line searches and accelerations. This paper uses the arc length method with line searches to increase the stability and substantially reduce the cpu time required for convergence in the finite element modelling of reinforced concrete. The arc length method is compared with the modified Newton–Raphson solution scheme and it was found that substantial savings in computer resources are obtained by using the arc length method. On difficult iterations the use of line searches is shown to lead to substantial improvement, with the best results occurring when using a slack tolerance of ψ = 0.8.