Abstract
In practical elastic-plastic problems, plastic flow is often contained. From this viewpoint, an elastic-plastic analysis method, in which most computational effort is associated with plastic region, is developed in the present study. The characteristic of this method is to replace the material stiffness of plastic region with that of elastic region. To justify the replacement, plastic strain increment is introduced in the plastic region. The main computational task is to determine the distribution of this plastic strain increment. The method is computationally very efficient in problems with contained plastic flow, which is demonstrated by solving numerical examples.
