Non-intrusive coupling: an attempt to merge industrial and research software capabilities

In computational mechanics, it is often difficult to test research innovations on industrial problems because of software limitations: many of the commercial finite element packages commonly used in the industry lack flexibility and openness, whereas in-house research developments are usually very specific and may lack features required for “real-life” industrial simulations. Non-intrusive coupling is a tentative answer to this problem. It consists in introducing local enhancements and refinements into an existing industrial problem through a separate nonlinear local model that comes with its own solver; the two models are coupled by the means of an iterative exchange algorithm inspired from domain decomposition methods and multiphysics solution techniques, using both models and solvers without any modification. So far, the method has been implemented around the finite element package Abaqus and has been used to introduce local plasticity and geometric details into a linear elastic global problem. While current developments include the simulation of localized damage in slender composite structures, we think that the method could be adapted to a wide class of problems including hybrid experimentalsimulation approaches.