A kinematically stabilized linear tetrahedral finite element for compressible and nearly incompressible finite elasticity

We propose a stabilized linear tetrahedral finite element method for static, finite elasticity problems involving compressible and nearly incompressible materials. Our approach relies on a mixed formulation, in which the nodal displacement unknown filed is complemented by a nodal Jacobian determinant unknown field. This approach is simple to implement in practical applications (e.g., in commercial software), since it only requires information already available when computing the Newton–Raphson tangent matrix associated with irreducible (i.e., displacement-based) finite element formulations. By nature, the proposed method is easily extensible to nonlinear models involving visco-plastic flow. An extensive suite of numerical tests in two and three dimensions is presented, to demonstrate the performance of the method.