• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.533-541
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• 2007

The Zienkiewicz-Zhu(Z/Z) error estimate is slightly modified for the hierarchical p-refinement, and is then applied to L-shaped plates subjected to bending to demonstrate its effectiveness. An adaptive procedure in finite element analysis is presented by p-refinement of meshes in conjunction with a posteriori error estimator that is based on the superconvergent patch recovery(SPR) technique. The modified Z/Z error estimate p-refinement is different from the conventional approach because the high order shape functions based on integrals of Legendre polynomials are used to interpolate displacements within an element, on the other hand, the same order of basis function based on Pascal's triangle tree is also used to interpolate recovered stresses. The least-square method is used to fit a polynomial to the stresses computed at the sampling points. The strategy of finding a nearly optimal distribution of polynomial degrees on a fixed finite element mesh is discussed such that a particular element has to be refined automatically to obtain an acceptable level of accuracy by increasing p-levels non-uniformly or selectively. It is noted that the error decreases rapidly with an increase in the number of degrees of freedom and the sequences of p-distributions obtained by the proposed error indicator closely follow the optimal trajectory.