Abstract
With the development of new hardware and software technologies, the trend of using three-dimensional finite element analysis in geotechnical engineering is growing recently. However, the solution of realistic large-scale problems still demands a significant amount of computational time and resources. The computational time can be even longer for the ill-conditioned systems when the stiffness of different elements differs by several orders of magnitude. In this paper, we demonstrate how the recent development of block diagonal preconditioning has effectively reduced the computational time of iterative solvers so that large-scale finite element analysis can be performed in a reasonable time on Desktop PCs using GeoFEA.