Computational homogenization of elasticity on a staggered grid

In this article, we propose to discretize the problem of linear elastic homogenization by finite differences on a staggered grid and introduce fast and robust solvers. Our method shares some properties with the FFT-based homogenization technique of Moulinec and Suquet, which has received widespread attention recently because of its robustness and computational speed. These similarities include the use of FFT and the resulting performing solvers. The staggered grid discretization, however, offers three crucial improvements. Firstly, solutions obtained by our method are completely devoid of the spurious oscillations characterizing solutions obtained by Moulinec-Suquet's discretization. Secondly, the iteration numbers of our solvers are bounded independently of the grid size and the contrast. In particular, our solvers converge for three-dimensional porous structures, which cannot be handled by Moulinec-Suquet's method. Thirdly, the finite difference discretization allows for algorithmic variants with lower memory consumption. More precisely, it is possible to reduce the memory consumption of the Moulinec-Suquet algorithms by 50%. We underline the effectiveness and the applicability of our methods by several numerical experiments of industrial scale.