A DIRECT METHOD FOR THE COMPUTATION OF CRITICAL POINTS IN STRUCTURAL GEOMETRIC NONLINEAR ANALYSIS

The critical points on the solution path are important features which reveal the capacity of the structure. Based on the arc-length method in tracing structural nonlinear solution, a direct Newton method for the computation of critical points is developed in this paper. This approach has high accuracy and can be widely used for the computation of either single or multiple critical points in nonlinear structural analysis. Numerical examples show that this method is accurate, reliable and efficient.