Remarks on the interpretation of current non‐linear finite element analyses as differential–algebraic equations

For the numerical solution of materially non-linear problems like in computational plasticity or viscoplasticity the finite element discretization in space is usually coupled with point-wise defined evolution equations characterizing the material behaviour. The interpretation of such systems as differential–algebraic equations (DAE) allows modern-day integration algorithms from Numerical Mathematics to be efficiently applied. Especially, the application of diagonally implicit Runge–Kutta methods (DIRK) together with a Multilevel-Newton method preserves the algorithmic structure of current finite element implementations which are based on the principle of virtual displacements and on backward Euler schemes for the local time integration. Moreover, the notion of the consistent tangent operator becomes more obvious in this context. The quadratical order of convergence of the Multilevel-Newton algorithm is usually validated by numerical studies. However, an analytical proof of this second order convergence has already been given by authors in the field of non-linear electrical networks. We show that this proof can be applied in the current context based on the DAE interpretation mentioned above. We finally compare the proposed procedure to several well-known stress algorithms and show that the inclusion of a step-size control based on local error estimations merely requires a small extra time-investment. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.