A comparative study of stress integration methods for the Barcelona Basic Model

The paper compares the accuracy and stability of implicit and explicit stress integration schemes applied to the Barcelona Basic Model. In addition, the effect of the integration scheme on the convergence of Newton–Raphson algorithm is studied. By running a Newton–Raphson algorithm for a single stress point, the number of iterations required to reach convergence gives some insight on the convergence of the finite element solution at the global level. The explicit algorithms tested incorporate substepping with error control and are based on Runge–Kutta methods of different orders or on the Richardson extrapolation method. The implicit return-mapping algorithms follow the procedures of Simo and Hughes [1] and Hofmann [2].