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*STATIC

Keyword type: step

This procedure is used to perform a static analysis. The load consists of the sum of the load of the last *STATIC step and the load specified in the present step with replacement of redefined loads.

There are two optional parameters: SOLVER and DIRECT. SOLVER determines the package used to solve the ensuing system of equations. The following solvers can be selected:

- the SGI solver
- SPOOLES [3,4].
- TAUCS
- the iterative solver by Rank and Ruecker [26], which is based on the algorithms by Schwarz [27].
- the PROFILE solver listed in [34]

Default is the SGI solver. If this solver is not installed, default is SPOOLES. If neither the SGI solver nor SPOOLES are installed, default is TAUCS. Finally, if neither the SGI solver, nor SPOOLES nor TAUCS are installed, the default is the iterative solver, which comes with the CalculiX package.

The SGI solver is the fastest, but is is proprietary: if you own SGI hardware you might have gotten the scientific software package as well, which contains the SGI sparse system solver. SPOOLES is also very fast, but has no out-of-core capability: the size of systems you can solve is limited by your RAM memory. With 2GB of RAM you can solve up to 250,000 equations. TAUCS is also good, but my experience is limited to the decomposition, which only applies to positive definite systems. It has an out-of-core capability and also offers a decomposition, however, I was not able to run either of them so far. Next comes the iterative solver. If SOLVER=ITERATIVE SCALING is selected, the preconditioning is limited to a scaling of the diagonal terms, SOLVER=ITERATIVE CHOLESKY triggers Incomplete Cholesky preconditioning. Cholesky preconditioning leads to a better convergence and maybe to shorter execution times, however, it requires additional storage roughly corresponding to the nonzeros in the matrix. If you are short of memory, diagonal scaling might be your last resort. The iterative methods perform well for truely three-dimensional structures. For instance, calculations for a hemisphere were about nine times faster with the ITERATIVE SCALING solver, and three times faster with the ITERATIVE CHOLESKY solver than with SPOOLES. For two-dimensional structures such as plates or shells, the performance might break down drastically and convergence often requires the use of Cholesky preconditioning. SPOOLES (and any of the other direct solvers) performs well in most situations with emphasis on slender structures but requires much more storage than the iterative solver. Finally, there is the PROFILE solver which performs well up to about 20,000 equations. For larger systems is consumes too much memory and is slow. In CalculiX it can only be used for linear calculations (no geometric or material nonlinearities allowed).

The parameter DIRECT is relevant for nonlinear calculations only, and indicates that automatic incrementation should be switched off.

In a static step, loads are by default applied in a linear way. Other loading patterns can be defined by an *AMPLITUDE card.

First line:

- *STATIC
- Enter any needed parameters and their values.

Second line (only relevant for nonlinear analyses)

- Initial time increment. This value will be modfied due to automatic incrementation, unless the parameter DIRECT was specified (default 1.).
- Time period of the step (default 1.).
- Minimum time increment allowed. Only active if DIRECT is not specified. Default is the initial time increment or 1.e-5 times the time period of the step, whichever is smaller.
- Maximum time increment allowed. Only active if DIRECT is not specified. Default is 1.e+30.

    Example:

    *STATIC,DIRECT
    .1,1.

defines a static step and selects the SPOOLES solver as linear equation solver in the step (default). If the step is a linear one, the other parameters are of no importance. If the step is nonlinear, the second line indicates that the initial time increment is .1 and the total step time is 1. Furthermore, the parameter DIRECT leads to a fixed time increment. Thus, if successful, the calculation consists of 10 increments of length 0.1.

Example files: beampic, beampis.

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