A high accurate time-domain-advance integration method for transient elastodynamic problems

All step-by-step integration methods available at present for structural dynamic analysis use the displacement, velocity, and acceleration vectors computed at a previous interval for evaluating those at an advanced time step. Hence, an accumulated error will be definitely introduced after such integration. This paper presents a novel time-domain-advance integration method for transient elastodynamic problems in which the exact initial conditions are strictly satisfied for the solutions for each time step. In this way, the accumulated error can be eliminated and the approximate solutions will converge to the exact ones uniformly on the whole time domain. Therefore, the new method is more accurate. When applying to a structural dynamic problem, the present mehtod does not have to use the initial acceleration as is required by most other algorithms and the corresponding computation can be avoided. The present method is simple in representation, easy to be programmed, and especially suitable for accurate analyses of long-time problems. The comparison of numerical results with exact ones shows that the present method is much more accurate than some most widely used algorithms.