An r-h adaptive strategy based on material forces and error assessment

A new r-h adaptive scheme is proposed and formulated. It involves a combination of the configurational force based r-adaption with weighted Laplacian smoothing and mesh enrichment by h-refinement. A Zienkiewicz-Zhu best guess stress error estimator is used in the h-refinement strategy. The best sequence for combining the effectiveness of r- and h- adaption has been evolved at in this study. A further reduction in the potential energy and the relative error norm of the system is found to be achieved with combined r-adaption and mesh enrichment (in the form h-refinement). Numerical study confirms that the proposed combined r-h adaption is more efficient than a purely h-adaptive approach and more flexible than a purely r-adaptive approach with better convergence characteristics.