An Introduction to Geometric Nonlinearity

Geometric nonlinearity may not even be explicitly introduced in a

fundamental course on structural mechanics. In fact, geometric
linearity is often tacitly assumed. In a geometrically linear setting,
the equations of equilibrium are formulated in the undeformed state
and are not updated with the deformation. This may sound a bit
alarming at first, since computing deformations is what structural
mechanics is all about.
However, in most engineering problems, the deformations are so
small that the deviation from the original geometry is not
perceptible. The small error introduced by ignoring the deformations
does not warrant the added mathematical complexity generated by
a more sophisticated theory. This is why a vast majority of analyses
are made with an assumption of geometric linearity.
There are a number of cases where the deformation cannot be
ignored, and not all of these cases comprise deformations that you
would intuitively think of as being large.

Effects of Including Geometric Nonlinearity

The most important effects on the mathematics when you include
geometric nonlinearity in COMSOL Multiphysics are:

A distinction is made between the Spatial and

the Material frame. The spatial coordinates of a certain point (
) differ from the material coordinates of the same point ( )
by the the displacement vector ( ), so that
. It will

thus matter whether you use uppercase or lowercase

coordinate names in expressions.
The strains are represented by the Green-Lagrange strain
tensor instead of the engineering strains.
The stresses are represented by the Second Piola-Kirchoff
stress tensor.
Pressure loads take the deformation into account.
Normals to boundaries are updated and area changes caused
by stretching are taken into account.
You can read more about different stress and strain tensors in
this previous blog post, but a small digression into the strain
measures is needed. To this end, let us look at the difference
between linear and the full nonlinear strain by considering some
components of the strain tensor.
The X-direction Green-Lagrange normal strain can be written as

If the quadratic terms are omitted, the familiar engineering strain is

retrieved:

Similarly, for a shear strain, the Green-Lagrange strain component

is

Again, the engineering strain is obtained by ignoring the nonlinear

terms:

Large or Not so Large Rotations

When a structure rotates significantly, the engineering strains used
in basic theory will no longer give a useful representation. Rigid
body rotations will cause nonzero components of the engineering
strain tensor. This will, through the constitutive law, cause stresses
that for physical reasons should not appear in a rigid body. Another
way of viewing this is that any useful strain tensor must be able to
reflect the fact that there is no stretching or change of relative
angles in a rigid body motion.
Consider a 2D body rotating rigidly in the xy-plane around the
origin. A simple linear plane stress model in which a rectangular
steel plate is rotated 10 is shown below.

Effective stress in a rectangular steel plate at a 10 rotation with no

geometric nonlinearity.
The result is an effective stress of 572 MPa, which is above the yield
limit for the most common steel qualities. To see why this
happened, lets study the analytical solution:
A point originally placed at (X,Y) will then have moved to a new
location (x,y), given by

This means that the displacements (u,v) are

The engineering strains will then be

For a rigid body rotation, all strains should be zero, but clearly two
of these strain components are not. A metal will often yield at a
strain that is of the order of 0.001. A fictitious strain of this size will
already occur at a rotation of 2.5. To keep the strain lower than
0.0001, there must not be rigid rotations larger than 0.8. This
means that even at angles where you often would expect a small
angle approximation to be sufficient, the geometrically nonlinear
approach must be used.
Using the same rigid body rotation as above, but using GreenLagrange strains instead, gives

Now this strain tensor component is zero for any value of the
rotation. This property can be shown for the whole Green-Lagrange
strain tensor and also for arbitrary rotations.
By using a geometrically nonlinear formulation, you can avoid
having these kinds of stress artifacts. This is confirmed by solving
the same problem with geometric nonlinearity enabled. The stress
levels are now pure numerical noise; 12 orders of magnitude lower
than the yield limit.

Effective stress at a 10 rotation while using geometric nonlinearity.

Stretching of Thin Structures

Consider the two beams in the sketch below:

Beams with different end conditions.

At the right end, the upper beam is free to translate horizontally,
while the lower beam is not. In a linear theory, these two end

conditions are equivalent if the beam is subjected to a vertical load.

There is no coupling between axial and bending action. However, in
a geometrically nonlinear analysis, the different end conditions will
lead to quite different results:

When the end is free to move axially, the vertical

displacement of the beam is almost the same as in the
geometrically linear case.
When the axial displacement is constrained, the vertical
displacement will be smaller than in the linear case and have
a strong nonlinear dependence on the load.
As the beam deflects, its center line will be stretched if the end
cannot move inwards. This will introduce a significant axial force
that will make the beam act similar to a wire in tension the
higher the tensile force, the more it will resist a transverse force.

Midpoint deflection of a beam with a square cross section of 0.05 x

0.05. The red line indicates the load where the deflection in the
linear analysis is 0.025 (half the height of the beam).
The same ideas also apply to plates and shells. If the boundary
conditions are such that deflection will cause in-plane tension, then
the plate will become significantly stiffer with increasing deflection.
There is a rule of thumb saying that if the deflection of the beam or
plate in a linear analysis exceeds half of its thickness, then
geometrically nonlinear effects should be considered. This is
indicated by the red line in the figure above.

Stress Stiffening
As seen in the previous example, the stiffness of a structure can
sometimes change significantly due to geometrically nonlinear
effects. This is sometimes referred to as stress stiffening. The term
is somewhat misleading, since it is also possible that the stiffness
could decrease. If we were to add a compressive axial load to the
beam above, its transverse stiffness would actually decrease.
Stress stiffening is important in, for example, rotating systems
where the centrifugal forces can introduce significant tensile
stresses. This causes the eigenfrequencies of the system to
increase with the RPM.

Campbell diagram showing how the natural frequencies of a

rotating blade change with speed of rotation.
Often, the loads that cause the prestress are not the same as the
one for which you actually perform the analysis. So there may be
two distinct load systems that must be analyzed separately.
In COMSOL Multiphysics, there are two predefined study types
specifically intended for the analysis of prestressed systems:

1.
2.

Prestressed Analysis, Eigenfrequency

Prestressed Analysis, Frequency Domain

Study types intended for the analysis of prestressed structures.

These study types consist of two study steps in which step one is
used for computing the prestress state. That study can be linear or
nonlinear. The second study step is linear in itself, but includes the
nonlinear terms caused by the geometric nonlinearity when setting
up the stiffness matrix.
If you are interested in examples in which stress stiffening is
important, please check out:

Fundamental Eigenfrequency of a Rotating Blade

Vibrating String

Vibrating Membrane

Buckling
Buckling, or the loss of stability when the load reaches a certain
critical value, is caused by geometrically nonlinear effects. In
COMSOL Multiphysics, there is a specific study type called Linear

Buckling for computing the first order approximation to the critical

load.

The Linear Buckling study type.

In the linear buckling study, an approximate buckling load is
obtained by solving an eigenvalue problem.
As an alternative, you can trace the full nonlinear response up to
the point of collapse, and even past it. In this case, you must
increase the load in smaller steps. This approach is significantly
more computationally expensive, but more accurate.

Load-deflection history with a buckling collapse at point A.

You can read more about buckling in this previous blog post.

Using Geometric Nonlinearity in COMSOL Multiphysics

Enabling Geometric Nonlinearity
Geometric nonlinearity is a property of the Study step. For those
study types for which it is relevant, a check box is available in the
settings for the study.

Settings for a stationary study.

Sometimes this check box is preselected and you cannot change it.
This happens when you include certain physics nodes in the model
tree that cannot be used in a linear context, such as:

Hyperelastic material
Large strain plasticity

Contact

Note that most nonlinear material models, such as nonlinear

elasticity or creep, do not assume geometric nonlinearity.

Solving a Problem with Geometric Nonlinearity

Geometrically nonlinear problems are often strongly nonlinear, and
you need to consider that when supplying settings for the solver.
Think of the beam with the fixed end mentioned above. When
solving the nonlinear problem, the solution after the first iteration
will be the same as the solution to the linear problem so that all
points on the beam move only vertically under a transverse load.
After the first iteration, there will thus be a significant axial
elongation of the beam. Such an elongation is related to an axial
force. As there is no net axial force (there is no external load in that
direction), this force will end up as a residual for the next iteration.
This unbalanced force may be larger than the applied load. To the
nonlinear solver, this looks like a very nasty problem and the solver
will often introduce damping.
Fortunately, these problems are often more well behaved than the
numerics would indicate. You can then speed up the solution
significantly by using a more aggressive iteration scheme than the
default.

Settings for the Fully Coupled solver.

Using the Constant Newton scheme instead of the automatic
adaptive scheme will cause the solver to make larger updates. The
damping factor can be set to 1 (no damping) or possibly 0.9.
A problem where geometrical nonlinearity is the only source of
nonlinearity will, in most cases, possess a unique solution for a
certain load level. In this sense, it is possible to analyze the problem
using a stationary analysis with a single load only. For convergence
reasons, it is sometimes better to gradually increase the load using
the parametric continuation solver.

An example of how the solver can be set up for a severely nonlinear

problem is shown in ourPinched Hemispherical Shell tutorial model .

Final Remarks
As we have shown above, there are several cases in which
geometric nonlinearities must be considered when solving structural
mechanics problems. So why dont we always include this effect in
our models to be on the safe side?

Even if the nonlinear effect is very small, invoking the

nonlinear solver will give you a significantly longer solution
time. This is not an issue for small models, but when you are
working with several million degrees of freedom, a reduction
of the solution time by a factor of two really matters.
Sometimes you want to be able to compare to an
analytical solution, and such solutions are often based on
linear theory.
You may need to follow a standard or analysis procedure
where it is assumed that a linear approach is used.
In a geometrically nonlinear problem, it is necessary to
use the actual load. If you just want to do a conceptual study
of a structural response, the solution may not converge if the
estimated load was too large.