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We present a robust and efficient form of the smoothed finite element method (S-FEM) to simulate hyperelastic bodies with compressible and nearly-incompressible neo-Hookean behaviour. The resulting method is stable, free from volumetric locking and robust on highly distorted meshes. To ensure inf-sup stability of our method we add a cubic bubble function to each element. The weak form for the smoothed hyperelastic problem is derived analogously to that of smoothed linear elastic problem. Smoothed strains and smoothed deformation gradients are evaluated on sub-domains selected by either edge information (edge-based S-FEM, ES-FEM) or nodal information (node-based S-FEM, NS-FEM). Numerical examples are shown that demonstrate the efficiency and reliability of the proposed approach in the nearly-incompressible limit and on highly distorted meshes. We conclude that, strain smoothing is at least as accurate and stable, as the MINI element, for an equivalent problem size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present in this paper a rigorous theoretical framework to show stability, convergence and accuracy of improved edge-based and face-based smoothed finite element methods (bES-FEM and bFS-FEM) for nearly-incompressible elasticity problems. The crucial idea is that the space of piecewise linear polynomials used for the displacements is enriched with bubble functions on each element, while the pressure is a piecewise constant function. The meshes of triangular or tetrahedral elements required by these methods can be generated automatically. The enrichment induces a softening in the bilinear form allowing the weakened weak ( W 2 ) procedure to produce a high-quality solution, free from locking and that does not oscillate. We prove theoretically that both methods confirm the uniform inf–sup and convergence conditions. Four numerical examples are given to validate the reliability of the bES-FEM and bFS-FEM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]