A domain decomposition method for bodies with heterogeneous microstructure basedon material regularization

Abstract A domain decomposition methodis developed to reduce the computational complexity of boundary value problems associated withthe structural analysis of bodies with arbitrary external geometry, loading and linearly elasticmicrostructure. The purpose of the method is to augment existing numerical discretizationmethods of analysis, such as the finite element method. The approach is to partition and decouplethe heterogeneous body into more computationally tractable, nonoverlapping, subdomains whoseunion forms the entire domain under analysis. This is achieved by approximating the subdomainboundary conditions. The approximate boundary conditions, of displacement or traction type, aresupplied from the solution to a relatively computationally inexpensive auxiliary boundary valueproblem characterized by a simple regularized microstructure. Since the decoupled subdomainsmay then be analyzed separately, the memory requirements are reduced and computingprocedures are trivially parallelizable. A-posteriori error bounds are developed for solutionsgenerated by this process. It is shown that, in the special case of uniform exterior loading, theerror bounds collapse into forms which imply results pertaining to effective property orderingcoinciding with those published by Huet (1990) .