PSBFEM-Abaqus: Development of User Element Subroutine (UEL) for Polygonal Scaled Boundary Finite Element Method in Abaqus

The polygonal scaled boundary finite element method (PSBFEM) is a novel method integrating the standard scaled boundary finite element method (SBFEM) and the polygonal mesh technique. This work discusses developing a PSBFEM framework within the commercial finite element software Abaqus. The PSBFEM is implemented by the User Element Subroutine (UEL) feature of the software. The details on the main procedures to interact with Abaqus, defining the UEL element, and solving the stiffness matrix by the eigenvalue decomposition are present. Moreover, we also develop the preprocessing module and the postprocessing module using the Python script to generate meshes automatically and visualize results. Several benchmark problems from two-dimensional linear elastostatics are solved to validate the proposed implementation. The results show that PSBFEM-UEL has significantly better than FEM convergence and accuracy rate with mesh refinement. The implementation of PSBFEM-UEL can conveniently use arbitrary polygon elements by the polygon/quadtree discretizations in the Abaqus. The developed UEL and the associated input files can be downloaded from https://github.com/hhupde/PSBFEM-Abaqus .