Efficient Method for Solution of Viscoelastic Problems

A general method capable of solving a large range of linear viscoelastic problems is presented using a Laplace transform approach. The time-dependent problem is thus reduced to an associated elastic problem in the transform plane. The analysis is accomplished by solving the associated problem in the transform plane by the finite element method and the inversion of the transformed displacements and stresses is achieved by least square collocation. The approach proved to be extremely economical in computation time compared with the step-by-step method and it can be used for a large range of time-dependent problems. The accuracy is checked against some known solutions and a further example from the field of soil mechanics is presented.