Explicit higher-order accurate isogeometric collocation methods for structural dynamics

Abstract The objective of the present work is to develop efficient, higher-order space- and time-accurate, methods for structural dynamics. To this end, we present a family of explicit isogeometric collocation methods for structural dynamics that are obtained from predictor–multicorrector schemes. These methods are very similar in structure to explicit finite-difference time-domain methods, and in particular, they exhibit similar levels of computational cost, ease of implementation, and ease of parallelization. However, unlike finite difference methods, they are easily extended to non-trivial geometries of engineering interest. To examine the spectral properties of the explicit isogeometric collocation methods, we first provide a semi-discrete interpretation of the classical predictor–multicorrector method. This allows us to characterize the spatial and modal accuracy of the isogeometric collocation predictor–multicorrector method, irrespective of the considered time-integration scheme, as well as the critical time step size for a particular explicit time-integration scheme. For pure Dirichlet problems, we demonstrate that it is possible to obtain a second-order-in-space scheme with one corrector pass, a fourth-order-in-space scheme with two corrector passes, and a fifth-order-in-space scheme with three corrector passes. For pure Neumann and mixed Dirichlet–Neumann problems, we demonstrate that it is possible to obtain a second-order-in-space scheme with one corrector pass and a third-order-in-space scheme with two corrector passes, and we observe that fourth-order-in-space accuracy may be obtained pre-asymptotically with three corrector passes. We then present second-order-in-time, fourth-order-in-time, and fifth-order-in-time fully discrete predictor–multicorrector algorithms that result from the application of explicit Runge–Kutta methods to the semi-discrete isogeometric collocation predictor–multicorrector method. We confirm the accuracy of the family of explicit isogeometric collocation methods using a suite of numerical examples.