• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.25-34
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• 1993

The long-term behavior, such as in excavation problems of weak medium, can be dealt with by the elasto-viscoplasticity models. In this paper, a combined formulation of elasto-viscoplasticity using boundary elements and finite elements without using internal cells is presented. The domain integral introduced due to the viscoplastic stresses is transformed into a boundary integral applying direct integration in cylindrical coordinates. The results of the developed boundary element analysis are compared with those from the explicit solution and from the finite element analysis. It is observed that the boundary element analysis without internal cells results in some error because of its deficiency in handling the nonlinearity in local stress concentration. Therefore, a coupled analysis of boundary elements and finite elements, in which finite elements are used in the area of stress concentration, is developed. The coupled method is applied to a time dependent inelastic problem with semi-infinite boundaries. It results in reasonable solution compared with other methods where relatively higher degree of freedoms are employed. Thus, it is concluded that the combined analysis may be used for such problems in the effective manner.