Journal of Materials Processing Technology 105 (2000) 110118

Comparison of implicit and explicit nite element methods

for dynamic problems
J.S. Sun, K.H. Lee, H.P. Lee*
Department of Mechanical and Production Engineering, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260, Singapore
Received 15 April 1999

Abstract
The nite element software ABAQUS offers several algorithms for dynamic analysis. The direct integration methods include the implicit
and the explicit methods which can be used for linear and nonlinear problems. The performance of these two methods are compared for
several dynamic problems including the impact of an elastic bar and a cylindrical disk on a rigid wall. The advantages of the implicit
method for small wavefront problems and the explicit method for short transient problems are veried. # 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All
rights reserved.
Keywords: Implicit nite element method; Explicit nite element method; Dynamic problems

1. Introduction
The nite element method (FEM) has become the most
popular method in both research and industrial numerical
simulations. Several algorithms, with different computational costs, are implemented in the nite element codes,
ABAQUS [1], which is a commonly used software for nite
element analysis. Understanding the nature, advantages and
disadvantages of these algorithms is very helpful for choosing the right algorithm for a particular problem.
Comparison of implicit and explicit methods for ABAQUS in nonlinear problems has been reported by ReBelo
et al. [2]. The unconditionally stable implicit method will
encounter some difculties when a complicated threedimensional model is considered. The reasons are as follows: (i) as the reduction of the time increment continues,
the computational cost in the tangent stiffness matrix is
dramatically increased and even causes divergence; (ii) local
instabilities cause force equilibrium to be difcult to
achieve.
The explicit techniques are thus introduced to overcome
the disadvantages of the implicit method [3]. For the explicit
method, the CPU cost is approximately proportional to the
size of the nite element model and does not change as
dramatically as the implicit method.

*
Corresponding author. Tel.: 65-874-2205; fax: 65-779-1459.
E-mail address: mpeleehp@nus.edu.sg (H.P. Lee).

The drawback of the explicit method is that it is

conditionally stable. The stability limit for an explicit
operator is that the maximum time increment must be less
than a critical value of the smallest transition times for a
dilatational wave to cross any element in the mesh. Secondly, the nature of the explicit method limits it to the
analysis of short transient problems. If this method is
used for quasi-static problems, the inertia effects must
be small enough to be neglected. One way to assure
this is to set the limit on the kinematic energy to be less
than 5% of the strain energy. Another limit is that only
the rst-order, displacement methods elements (four-node
quadrilaterals, eight-node bricks, etc.) are available for the
present version.
For dynamic problems, ABAQUS also offers some other
methods such as a modal dynamic algorithm. However, only
direct integration methods implicit dynamics and explicit
methods are suitable for nonlinear problems.
Most of the reported works on the comparison of implicit
and explicit methods are on quasi-static nonlinear problems
[2,3]. In this paper, attention is paid to comparison of the
implicit and the explicit method for linear dynamic problems.
2. Solution procedures
The implicit procedure uses an automatic increment
strategy based on the success rate of a full Newton iterative

0924-0136/00/$ see front matter # 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 9 2 4 - 0 1 3 6 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 5 8 0 - X

J.S. Sun et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 105 (2000) 110118

solution method:
i
i
Dui1 Dui K1
t
F I

(1)

where Kt is the current tangent stiffness matrix, F the

applied load vector, I the internal force vector, and Du is
the increment of displacement.
For an implicit dynamic procedure, the algorithm is
dened by Hilber et al. [4,5]:
M
ui1 1 aKui1 aKui Fi1

(2)

where M is the mass matrix, K the stiffness matrix, F the

vector of applied loads and u the displacement vector:
u

i1

Dtu_

Dt

12

b
u

i1

b
u

(3)

and
ui g
ui1
u_ i1 u_ i Dt1 g

(4)

with
b 14 1 a2 ;

g 12 a;

1
3

a0

(5)

a 0:05 is chosen by default in ABAQUS as a small

damping term to quickly remove the high frequency noise
without having a signicant effect on the meaningful, lower
frequency response.
The explicit procedure is based on the implementation of
an explicit integration rule along with the use of diagonal
element mass matrices. The equation of motion for the body
is integrated using an explicit central difference integration
rule:
ui1 ui Dti1 u_ i1 ;
ui
u_ i1=2 u_ i1=2 12 Dti1 Dti 

i M1
Fi Ii
u

As mentioned above, the explicit integration operator is

conditionally stable, so that the time increments must satisfy
Dt 

2
omax

where omax is the element maximum eigenvalue. A conservative estimate of the stable time increment is given by
the minimum value for all elements. The above stability
limit can be written as
 
Le
Dt min
cd
where Le is the characteristic element dimension and cd the
current effective, dilatational wave speed of the material.
3. Example problems
3.1. Impact of an elastic bar against a rigid wall
As the rst example, the impact of an elastic bar against a
rigid wall is presented. This model is used to compare the
results by ABAQUS and the reported results by Zhong [6].
The dimensions of the bar are 1  1  10 m3 . Young's
modulus is given as E100 kPa. Possion's ratio is n 0, and
the mass density is r 0:001 kg m3 .
Eighty C3D8 and C3D8R (eight-node bricks) elements
are used for the implicit and explicit methods, respectively.
An initial velocity of 1 m s1 is prescribed to the bar striking
the rigid wall. The elements of the rigid wall are R3D4. The
mesh is shown in Fig. 1.
The impact time can be simply estimated by
2L
c
where L is the length of the bar, and c the wave speed for this
kind
material,
which
is
determined
by
p
of
E=r 2:0  103 m s1 .
For the implicit method, the half-step residual tolerance
HAFTOL is a very important parameter to control the
computational accuracy [1]. A large value of 10 is set
initially. In Fig. 2a, the contact reaction forces are compared.

Dt

 the acceleration, and i and i 12,

where u_ is the velocity, u
1
i 2 refer to the increment number and mid-increment
numbers.
(6)

where M is the mass ``lumped'' matrix, F the applied load

vector and I the internal force vector.

111

Fig. 1. Mesh of the bar.

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J.S. Sun et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 105 (2000) 110118
Fig. 2. (a) Contact reaction force RF1 with HAFTOL10; (b) the stress component S11 with HAFTOL10; (c) contact reaction force RF1 with HAFTOL1; (d) the stress component S11 with HAFTOL1.

J.S. Sun et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 105 (2000) 110118

113

Fig. 3. Mesh of the cylindrical disk.

It only takes 19 steps and less than 1 s CPU time for the
explicit method, while it takes 106 s of CPU time for the
implicit method. However, under this condition, the accuracy of the results by the explicit method is better than that
by the implicit method. Fig. 2b shows the stress component
S11. The values of S11 by the implicit method are found to
oscillate much more than the corresponding results by the
explicit method.
From Fig. 2a, the reaction force is found to be about
10 N. In order to secure more accurate results, 10% of the
reaction force, 1.0, is set as the revised HAFTOL value. The
reaction force and S11 are shown in Figs. 2c and d. The
values of S11 by the implicit methods still oscillate more
than those by the explicit method, but both the stresses and
reaction force oscillate less than the corresponding results
for the previous case with HAFTOL10. The CPU time for
the implicit method signicantly increases, from 106 to
524 s.
The periods of the FEM deviate from that of the exact
solution. As mentioned above, a is set to 0:05 for the
implicit method to induce articial damping. The numerical
dissipation leads to an amplitude decay of 2px [5], where x is
the algorithmic damping ratio. This is illustrated in Figs. 2a
and c.

analyze and predict failure. Comparing the stresses by these

two methods is helpful for failure diagnosis.
A three-dimensional example is needed for the above
purpose. This example is shown in Fig. 3. A cylindrical disk
is formed by two cylinders. The radius of the bottom
cylinder is 1 m, and the radius of the top cylinder is
0.25 m. The bottom cylinder is of 0.5 m height, and the
height of the top one is 0.1 m. The distance between the
centers of these two cylinders is 0.31 m. There are 548 eightnode brick elements and 810 nodes for the mesh. Elements
173 and 409 are chosen for the purpose of stress comparison.
Nodes 311 and 709 are one of the eight nodes for elements
173 and 409, respectively.
The material is ductile steel with a Young's modulus of
E 200 GPa and density of r 7833 kg m3 . Poisson's
ration is taken to be n 0 in order that the stresses can
be simply calculated by


E @ui @uj

; i; j 1; 3
(7)
si;j
2 @xj @xi

3.2. Impact of an elastic cylindrical disk against a rigid

wall
In the rst example, the results for the displacement by
both the implicit and explicit method in direction 1 agree
very well with the initial velocity in direction 1, which is
used to control the movement of the bar. Moreover, the
displacements in the other two directions are very small.
Actually, this example cannot show the effects of these two
methods on the displacements of the other two directions
and subsequent effects on the stress distribution. In engineering applications, stress analysis is usually important to

Fig. 4. The maximum principal stress SP3 for static contact.

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Fig. 5. (a) The contact reaction force RF2; (b) the displacement component U1 of node 311; (c) the displacement component U2 of node 311; (d) the stress
component S11 of element 173; (e) the stress component S22 of element 173; (f) the stress component S33 of element 173.

J.S. Sun et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 105 (2000) 110118

Fig. 5. (Continued ).

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J.S. Sun et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 105 (2000) 110118

Fig. 6. (a) The displacement U3 by explicit; (b) the displacement U3 by implicit.

in which si;j are the six independent components of stress, ui

are the three components of displacement, and xj are the
three coordinates.
The maximum principal stresses (SP3) by the static
algorithm are shown in Fig. 4. The original gap between
the model and the rigid wall is 0.01 m. A static displacement
of 0.02 m is applied on the bottom surface of the large
cylinder.
An initial velocity of 10 m s1 is prescribed. Fig. 5a shows
the agreement of the contact reaction force RF2 for the
results by the two methods.
The displacements U1, U2 and U3 of node 311 are shown
in Figs. 5ac. U3 shows a large difference, but the absolute
value of U3 for node 311 is relatively small because node
311 is on the axisymmetric axis. Due to the fact that the
displacement of the rigid body in direction 2 is comparatively large relative to the deformation, U2 shows an insignicant change, but Figs. 5df show apparent differences of
stresses of element 173 by these two methods. Although at
some region such as node 331, the values of U3 are quite
different for the two methods, the whole displacement
pattern of U3 is similar, as shown in Figs. 6a and b.
On the other hand, the stress components S11, S22 and
S33 of another element 409 which connects to the contact
surface, show agreement by the two methods in Figs. 7ac.
Displacements have higher accuracy than stresses, thus the
three displacements U1, U2 and U3 of node 709 obviously
agree. The results are testied in Figs. 6a and b. For stress
distribution, the regularity is the same. Figs. 7d and e show
that the pattern of stress distribution is similar for most
regions, especially at regions where the stresses are compressive and the absolute values are large. This is a compressive model, the absolute values of tensile stresses being
much smaller than the compressive stresses. The differences
shown in Figs. 7d and e are all in the region of tensile
stresses.
For this fast impact problem, the total time is usually very
short, the computational cost of the explicit begin about one
tenth that of the implicit.

3.3. Slow contact between an elastic cylindrical disk and a

rigid wall
The displacement for the bottom surface of the elastic
cylindrical disk is set to be 0.02 m. The total time is 1 s,
which is much larger than in the fast case (0.002 s).
Fig. 8a shows the displacement U2 of node 311, whilst
Fig. 8b shows the stress component S22 of element 173:
differences are apparent.
Fig. 8b shows the stress component S22 of element 409.
The results show good agreement. Figs. 8c and d compare
the maximum principal stress SP3. The regularities are the
same as mentioned in the last section. The perfect agreement
between Fig. 8c and Figs. 6a and b show that the results by
implicit methods are very accurate, where under these
conditions inertia effects can be neglected.
The stable time step for explicit is 7  106 s for the slow
case and 8:5  106 s for the fast case. For the slow case, the
time increment 139935 is much more than that of the fast
case. Thus the CPU cost increases dramatically from 7 min
to 1 h 17 min. The CPU cost for the implicit method is
10 min.
4. Closure
Fast and slow linear contact problems have been analyzed
by different methods in ABAQUS. For the fast case, the
advantages of the explicit method are apparent within the
desirable tolerance. The cost of the explicit method is much
less than that of the implicit method. Due to numerical
damping, amplitude decay is observed for the implicit
method.
For the slow case, the solutions are more unstable because
high frequency numerical noise becomes more important.
The numerical damping induced in the implicit method
shows its function to remove the noise and keep the results
more accurate. Because the explicit method is conditionally
stable, the stable time period is much smaller than that of the

J.S. Sun et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 105 (2000) 110118

117

Fig. 7. (a) The stress component S11 of element 409; (b) the stress component S22 of element 409; (c) the stress component S33 of element 409; (d) the
maximum principal stress SP3 of the impacting disk by explicit; (e) the maximum principal stress SP3 of the impacting disk by implicit.

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J.S. Sun et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 105 (2000) 110118

Fig. 8. (Continued ).

implicit method. If the whole procedure is very long, it takes

many time increments for the explicit method. Thus the
advantages of the implicit method are obvious for the slow
contact problem.
References

Fig. 8. (a) The displacement U2 of node 311; (b) the stress component S22
of element 173; (c) the stress component S22 of element 409; (d) the
maximum principal stress (SP3) of the slow contact disk by explicit; (e)
the maximum principal stress (SP3) of the slow contact disk by implicit.

[1] ABAQUS User's Examples and Theory Manual, Version 5.7. Hibbitt,
Karlsson & Sorensen Inc., 1998.
[2] N. Rebelo, J.C. Nagtegaal, L.M. Taylor, Comparison of implicit and
explicit nite element methods in the simulation of metal forming
processes, in: Chenot, Wood, Zienkiewicz (Eds.), Numerical
Methods in Industrial Forming Processes, 1992, pp. 99108.
[3] Hibbitt, Karlsson & Sorensen Inc., Application of implicit and
explicit nite element techniques to metal forming, J. Mater. Process.
Technol. 45 (1994) 649656.
[4] H.M. Hilber, T.J.R. Hughes, Collocation, dissipation and `overshoot'
for time integration schemes in structural dynamics, Earthquake Eng.
Struct. Dyn. 6 (1978) 99117.
[5] T.J.R. Hughes, The Finite Element Method Linear Static and
Dynamic Finite Element Analysis, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs,
NJ, 07632, 1987.
[6] Z.H. Zhong, Finite Element Procedures for Contact Impact
Problems, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993.