Finding equilibrium paths by minimizing external work in dynamic relaxation method

In the common DR technique, a jump occurs after the appearance of the snap-through or snap-back points. As a result, this approach cannot trace the equilibrium path. To cure this drawback, a load factor is employed. In this paper, a new procedure for calculating this factor is suggested. For this purpose, the work increment of the external loads is minimized with respect to the load factor. This factor is only dependent on the fictitious parameters of the DR strategy. To show the robustness of this formulation, it is used in the geometric nonlinear analysis of various structures. Based on the number of iterations, numbers of convergence points and total duration analysis, the different methods are ranked. The obtained results prove the high efficiency of the suggested scheme. In other words, the authors' technique is accurate and has more rapid convergence rate, in comparison to the similar algorithms.